We should always learn something from the ants.
They are so small and they carry so much.
We should always learn something from the fruit tree.
They bow back towards the ground to give their fruit.
We should learn something from everything in Nature.
Selected words of wisdom from interviews with women farmers in Gharwal Himalaya

“

“

Rowan and Gorse by Rose Anderson

WELCOME

OUR CORE VALUES

R

esurgence has always been about our deepest
values and in this, our 45th anniversary
year, the subject of those values is our
particular focus.
In this issue, the outspoken environmentalist
George Monbiot highlights the critical difference
between intrinsic and extrinsic values and suggests
that for the genuine wellbeing of both people and
planet Earth, we need to live by our intrinsic values.
This then is the special theme running through most
of the thought-provoking articles in our spring issue.
For example, poet, playwright and former
president of the Czech Republic Vรกclav Havel
(one of the most outstanding holistic thinkers
and writers of our time) urges urban planners
to work with the values of place, community,
neighbourhood and Nature when they are
designing our cities and towns.
Another poet and philosopher, Archbishop Rowan
Williams, shows that we need to put ethics before
economics, and when governments and business
leaders are obsessed with economic growth at any
cost, his message of moral economy becomes even
more pertinent.
In his article, fellow Christian Peter Owen
Jones, radical vicar and presenter of several BBC
documentaries on pilgrimages, expounds the values
of home and hospitality, a refreshing point of view
at a time when most countries are blindly pursuing
the path of tourism.
And last but not least in this series of articles on
intrinsic values, Prince Charles, in his broad-ranging
keynote essay, elucidates the paramount importance
of ecology. Although the context of his article is
Islam, respect for the environment and care for

Issue 265

the Earth are values at the core of all religions and
wisdom traditions. And he is right: the solution to
the current environmental crisis is to restore the
wisdom of restraint, respect and reverence for all life.
The mainstream world of politics, commerce and
media might suggest that any talk of values and
ideals is meaningless when we have to live in the
real world, but my response is that the world of
politics and economics has been run by the realists
for a long time, but what have they got to show for
it? What have they achieved by being Realists?
In spite of all the progress in science and technology
and in spite of unprecedented economic growth over
the past 60 years, these Realists have failed to solve
the fundamental problems of malnutrition, hunger
and war. Under their watch, humanity continues
to spend a vast amount of resources on either
weapons of destruction or luxuries that bring natural
devastation, whilst huge numbers of men, women
and children suffer from deprivation and disease.
Rising population, dwindling natural resources, and
the threat of global climate change are all the result
of resting power in the hands of the Realists, whose
legacy includes entire countries in debt while their
banks are bailed out by the taxpayers.
The Realists have been given ample chance to
bring peace and happiness to humankind but they
have utterly failed.
So in these circumstances let us give the Idealists
a chance.
Humanity will be far better served by the intrinsic
values of hospitality, humility and harmony than by
the extrinsic values of success, speed and greedy
self-interest.
Satish Kumar

1

CONTENTS
No.265 March/April 2011

FRONTLINE
4 ACTION FROM THE

GRASSROOTS

UNDERCURRENTS
8 CHAMPIONS OF

8

INTRINSIC VALUES
Resurgence celebrates all those who
share our values

10 TRANSCENDING SELF

INTEREST
George Monbiot
Why we should never apologise for
values that create a fairer world

12 A CALL TO HUMILITY

Václav Havel
The Czech playwright and former
President on the need to design
cities fit for humans and Nature

14 MORAL HOUSEKEEPING

Rowan Williams
The Archbishop of Canterbury
shares his vision for ‘correcting’
values that led to the collapse

16 PILGRIM OR TOURIST?

Peter Owen Jones
Exploring the real journey we must
all make

20 MUSIC FOR PEACE

Donald Reeves
How the music of Bach inspires the
author’s peace-building work

REGULARS
1 WELCOME

28 PROJECTIONS

50 THE AGE OF BEAUTY

Satish Kumar

Caspar Walsh

30 THE VEGETARIAN FOODIE

Jane Hughes

32 PIONEERS

Helena Drakakis

34 SLOW TRAVEL

Charles V Clark

36 NATURE WRITING

Jeremy James

38 GARDEN DESIGN

James Towillis

40 OPINION

Hector Christie

41 LETTERS

ARTS & CRAFTS
KEYNOTES

42 POETRY

22 ISLAM AND THE

2

ENVIRONMENT
HRH The Prince of Wales
We need look no further than
the timeless wisdom of sacred
traditions to get back on track

Barbara Diethelm
A paint-maker shares her discovery of
the deeper meanings of colour
Linda Proud
Celebrating the life of Botticelli

52 THE ART OF LIBERATION

Harry Eyres
Reviewing Tate Britain’s Romantics
Rehang exhibition

REVIEWS
54 LITTLE MAGIC

Harland Walshaw reviews Truda
Lane’s Lifelines

55 ABSTRACT AFFINITIES

Philip Vann reviews Kurt Jackson: A
New Genre of Landscape Painting

56 A STELLAR LIFE

Chellis Glendinning reviews
Stephanie Mills’ On Gandhi’s Path

57 THINKING OUTSIDE

THE BOX
Sophie Poklewski Koziell reviews
Matthew Crawford’s The Case for
Working with Your Hands

58 GREEN THE WORLD

John Clarke reviews Marian Van
Eyk McCain’s GreenSpirit

March/April 2011

www.resurgence.org
WEB EXCLUSIVES
The Resurgence Peace Garden – created by James Towillis
as part of the Gardening World Cup 2010 in Japan, which
highlights the connection between Nature, world peace and
sustainable living

12

‘Back to Front’ gardening – Roxanna Summers introduces a
new project that uses front gardens for food production

Resurgence Summer Camp 2011
Celebrating 45 years of Resurgence and 21 years of Green
and Away. Join us for a weekend of talks, music, dance and
crafts, with speakers Peter Owen Jones and Peter Harper.
Updated programme and booking forms available online at
www.resurgence.org/summercamp

22

BLOGS
New blogs on topical issues including Nature, science,
conservation and more

A JOURNEY WITH Resurgence
In each issue you will find:
Frontline – action from the grassroots
Undercurrents – exploring emerging ideas
Keynotes – the Big Vision
Regulars – turning theory into practice
Arts – beauty with the Resurgence ethos
Reviews – to continue the journey
Members – over to you

63 A NEW LOGIC

Sara Parkin explains why ‘positive deviance’
– the theory she explores in her new book –
is the only strategy left to environmentalists

dynamic new community group
has started a pioneer project
growing food on the roof of its local
supermarket in Crouch End, London.
It all started, as most good projects do,
over a cup of coffee. This one was shared
between Andrew Thornton, the owner
of a Budgens franchise store, and AzulValerie Thome, a committed community
activist with a background in organic
gardening, permaculture design and
community projects. They decided to
develop a model of growing food on
urban flat roofs, in the hope that it would
be replicated by other supermarkets and
urban organisations.
The first job was to have the roof
surveyed to see what weight load it
could bear. At the same time, delicate

4

negotiations were conducted between
landlord, leaseholder and franchisee.
It is relatively simple to plant a seed,
nurture it and harvest it; but the success

car park, protected from urban foxes
by makeshift pallet fences, oblivious of
the frantic background work needed for
them to be lifted to their aerial home.
Finally, on the 31st of May 2010, a crane
lifted ten tons of free council compost
onto the roof. The council also ‘retired’
250 green recycling boxes to the
project. These made ideal food-growing
planters as they had holes in the bottom,
allowing drainage. Wormeries and
compost tumblers were also installed.
The volunteers quickly planted up an
orchard, vegetables, fruits, edible flowers
and mushrooms. All of the food is
grown to organic standards, following
biodynamic rhythms.
“At first the roof was a dead,
cemented, lifeless place,” explains Azul,
“and then within weeks it was alive and
literally buzzing.” The first visitors were
red-tailed bumblebees, followed quickly
by honeybees, solitary bees, butterflies
and a mass of ladybirds: volunteers
counted 30 different insect species.
Thanks to these important pollinators,
within five weeks there was produce
to sell in the supermarket below. The
roof has a particular ecosystem – it is
hotter than on the ground, but it is also
windier and more exposed. Tomatoes
did particularly well, and didn’t suffer
from the blight that ‘ground’ gardeners
complained of. Also on sale from the
roof garden were mixed salad leaves,
pak choi, carrots, beans, peas, spinach,
radishes and courgettes.
To begin with, the only access to
the rooftop garden was through the
supermarket and up a wobbly ladder. Later,
after a ‘fundraising feast’, enough money
was raised to provide a public-access
scaffolding tower on the outside of the
building. Now schoolchildren and other
community groups are able to visit the

“...within weeks it was alive and literally buzzing”
of this project also relied on powers of
persuasion in order to secure the legal
framework that would allow the project
to unfold. Although nothing could be
planted on the roof before the paperwork
for health and safety, risk assessment and
insurance was signed off, the volunteers
couldn’t wait.
In February 2010 they started their
project by planting seeds in compostfilled loo-roll-cardboard plant pots. The
seedlings began life in the supermarket

project and join in with regular workshops.
Representatives from Marks & Spencer,
The London School of Economics and
Southbank Centre are among the curious
who’ve come to see this marvellous,
productive ecosystem in the sky.
It’s estimated that there are 3 million
square metres of flat-roof space suitable
for green roofs in London – just think of
the possibilities.
foodfromthesky.org.uk

March/April 2011

by Sophie Poklewski Koziell

NO MORE PLAYING GOD!

UN declares moratorium on climate
techno-fixes

T

he latest biennial meeting of the UN Convention on
Biological Diversity (CBD), held in Japan last December,
closed with a de facto moratorium on geoengineering
projects and experiments. As a result, any private or public
experimentation or adventurism intended to manipulate
the planetary thermostat will now be in violation of this
landmark decision.
Geoengineering is the proposed large-scale manipulation
of Earth’s oceans, soils and atmosphere with the intent of
combating climate change. Geoengineering advocates have
put forward a wide range of proposals to artificially modify
these ecosystems to address climate change, including
putting sulphate particles into the upper atmosphere to
reflect the sun, adding iron particles to the oceans to grow
carbon dioxide-absorbing plankton, and injecting silver
iodide into clouds to produce rain.
The UN decision has been hailed by many environmental
groups as a victory for common sense and precaution.
However, some delegations are concerned that the interim
definition of geoengineering is too narrow because
it does not include carbon capture and storage (CCS)
technologies. Before the next CBD meeting there will be
ample opportunity to consider these questions in more
detail – but the good news is that climate techno-fixes are
now firmly on the UN agenda.

With thanks to www.ecologicalinternet.org

A SEA IS REVIVED

A dam brings good news

T

en years ago it seemed that the Aral Sea was a wasteland.
The Soviet Union’s decision to divert the Aral’s feeder
rivers to irrigate cotton farms had turned an area the size
of Ireland into a dust bowl. There was no water, no fish
and no jobs. It was sadly a textbook case of a human-made
environmental catastrophe.
However, five years after the construction of a dam, fresh
river water is now filling up the northern part of the Aral
Sea in Kazakhstan (known as ‘The Small Aral Sea’). Large
sections of barren seabed have become resubmerged, and
experts are amazed that the water has reached the target
depth of 42 metres only a year after the completion of
the dam. Native fish have quickly restocked the sea, and
the local fishing industry has been revived. The return of
the water, covering the dusty seabed, has also meant a
great reduction in respiratory problems and throat cancer
in the region.

Remote Nepali mountain village

Photo: www.3sistersadventure.com

SISTER ACT

An all-women trekking agency discovers
how empowering Nepali women is
good for business

S

ixteen years ago three Nepali sisters, Lucky, Dicky and
Nicky Chhetri, founded 3 Sisters Adventure Trekking
with a view to empowering and employing rural women in
adventure travel. Inspired by their love of the mountains and
the strength they gained from mountaineering, they decided
to train women as guides.
Via their local NGO, Empowering Women of Nepal, 3
Sisters offers unprecedented opportunities for women from
poor, remote mountainous regions to become confident,
self-sufficient and successful through adventure tourism. So
far over 600 women have attended their women’s trekking
guide training.
3 Sisters Adventure Trekking provides foreign women
travellers with the opportunity to connect with Nepali women,
to travel free from male harassment, and to know that their
fees support the independence of Nepali women. Unlike other
Nepalis involved in tourism, the 3 Sisters guides and porters
aren’t overburdened or ill equipped. Besides on-the-job
training, they receive insurance, a provident fund and trekking
equipment. Their children are given tuition fees for school,
and there is a microfinance system for loans.
Recently the project was recognised for its valuable work
and was invited to take part in a marketing training scheme
organised by Dutch agency SNV, the UN Environment
Programme and Nepal Tourism Board. The scheme gave the 3
Sisters project the opportunity to network outside Nepal and
to meet other members of the growing ‘responsible travel’
community. “We were doing all these ‘responsible’ things but
we had no idea that they had a business value and that we
could promote them. You see, the tourist eye sees differently
from our eyes, and we just didn’t think in that way before,”
says Lucky.
www.3sistersadventure.com

Issue 265

5

SUTTON LIFE CENTRE

An innovative new eco-building to inspire young people

A

pioneering new learning centre,
Sutton Life Centre, has opened
in South London. The building has
been awarded the highest possible
environmental rating for its use of
sustainably sourced building materials
and its super-insulation. In addition, a
carbon-neutral biomass boiler heats the
building, and supplements an earth-tube
system that helps to warm the building

in the winter and cool it in the summer.
Water for the toilets and plants is supplied
by harvested rainwater, and highefficiency lighting is installed throughout.
The centre contains an indoor street
resembling a movie set, and a multimedia studio where 360° video images
can be projected onto the walls to
create a range of virtual worlds, from
onrushing trains to the destruction

of a rainforest. The Life Centre also
houses a library, community rooms,
a youth centre, Sutton’s only outdoor
climbing wall, an eco-garden and allweather sports pitches. It is predicted
that thousands of children will visit the
centre, where ‘green’ lessons will be part
of the experience.
www.suttonlifecentre.org

BIRCHWOOD SPECIALIST

A rare sawfly is found at a Caledonian Forest conservation site

C

onservation charity Trees for Life announced in November
last year that it had discovered a rare species of sawfly that
had never previously been recorded in the UK. The specimen was
collected on the Dundreggan Estate in Glen Moriston, Invernessshire. The highland estate is a key site in Trees for Life’s awardwinning work to restore Scotland’s Caledonian Forest. It is notable
for its biodiversity, and over 50 specimens that are listed as
priorities for conservation in the UK have been found there.
This particular sawfly species is also thought to be extremely
rare in Europe, having been found only in Finland and Latvia.
It is considered to be a true northern European birchwood

specialist, and its discovery at Glen Moriston illustrates the
importance of the estate’s birch-juniper woodland, which is
amongst the best of its type in Scotland.
The discovery of the sawfly is the latest in a string of finds
at the site. These include a mining bee thought to have been
extinct in Scotland since 1949, and the golden horsefly, which
had only been seen twice in Scotland since 1923 until it was
spotted in Dundreggan in 2008.
www.treesforlife.org.uk
Courtesy: www.positivenews.org.uk

BACK FROM THE BRINK

Conservation efforts save rare snake

I

n the mid-1990s there were only 50 Antiguan racer
snakes left in the wild. Scientists discovered a small
colony on Great Bird Island, off the coast of Antigua,
and realised that they were in danger of becoming
extinct. A conservation programme was quickly
launched, and 15 years later it is celebrating its success.
It appears that two species introduced to the
island by humans – the mongoose and the black rat
– were responsible for the decline of the Antiguan
racer snake. Humans also played their own part, as
the defenceless snakes were wrongly seen as a threat.
By raising awareness of the snakes, removing rats
and mongooses from the islands and carrying out
a pioneering reintroduction programme, the snake
population has increased tenfold. Remarkably the
snake conservation efforts have also benefited other
native wildlife species that share the same habitat:
the number of birds has increased thirty-fold, sea
turtles and lizards have benefited from reduced
predation of their eggs by rats, and even the plant
life has improved.
www.antiguanracer.org

n November 2010, on the eve of the UN climate
change meetings in Cancún, Mexico, 350 Earth
held the world’s first global climate art exhibition.
Massive public art installations were made in over
a dozen places across the globe, large enough to
be seen from space. Most of the art projects were
photographed by satellites moving at 17,000 miles
per hour nearly 400 miles above the Earth, giving
organisers a window of only a few minutes to
make sure their installation was a success.
In Spain, a giant representation of the face of
a young girl appeared on the sands of the Delta
del Ebro. In Mexico City, thousands of people
clustered together to form a ‘human hurricane’.

The arresting image represented Mexico’s
vulnerability to climate change impacts such as
the devastating hurricanes that hit the country
last year. In New Delhi, the second-largest city
in the world, over 3,000 schoolchildren worked
with aerial artist Daniel Dancer to form an image
of a giant elephant. The elephant is the national
heritage animal of India, worshipped in the
form of Ganesha, known as ‘the remover of all
obstacles’. However, the elephant image also
urges world leaders not to ignore ‘the elephant in
the room’: climate change.
www.earth.350.org
Sophie Poklewski Koziell is an Associate Editor of Resurgence.

Transcending Self-interest
We must lead the shift
from extrinsic to intrinsic
values, and start by
not apologising for the
policies that create a
fairer and kinder world,
writes George Monbiot

10

S

o here we are, forming an orderly queue at the slaughterhouse gate. The
punishment of the poor for the errors of the rich, the abandonment of
universalism, the dismantling of the shelter the state provides: apart from a
few small protests, none of this has yet brought us out fighting.
The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests remains the pervasive
mystery of the 21st century. In the United States, blue-collar workers angrily demand
that they be left without health care, and insist that millionaires should pay less tax.
In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors
risked their lives, with barely a mutter of protest.
What has happened to us?
The answer, I think, is provided by probably the most interesting report I read last
year. Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values, written by Tom Crompton
of the environment group WWF, examines a series of fascinating recent advances in
the field of psychology, and offers a remedy to the blight that now afflicts every good
cause from welfare to climate change.
Progressives have been suckers for a myth of human cognition, which Tom Crompton
labels the Enlightenment Model. This holds that people make rational decisions by
assessing facts. All that has to be done to persuade people is to lay out the data: they will
then use it to decide which options best support their interests and desires.
But a host of psychological experiments have shown that it simply doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t work
like this. Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept only that

March/April 2011

information which confirms our identity and values, rejecting
any of the information that conflicts with them. In other
words, we mould our thinking around our social identity,
protecting it from serious challenge, and so confronting
people with inconvenient facts is likely only to harden their
resistance to change.
Our social identity is shaped by values that psychologists
classify as either extrinsic or intrinsic. Extrinsic values concern
status and self-advancement. People with a strong set of
extrinsic values fixate on how others see them. They cherish
financial success, image and fame. Intrinsic values concern
relationships with friends, family and community, and selfacceptance. Those who have a strong set of intrinsic values are
not dependent on praise or rewards from other people. They
have beliefs that transcend their self-interest.
Few people are all extrinsic or all intrinsic; our social identity
is more usually formed by a mixture of values. But what
psychological tests in nearly 70 countries do show is that values
cluster together in remarkably consistent patterns. Those who
strongly value financial success, for example, have less empathy,
stronger manipulative tendencies, a stronger attraction to
hierarchy and inequality, stronger prejudices towards strangers
and less concern about human rights and the environment.
Those who have a strong sense of self-acceptance have more
empathy and a greater concern about human rights, social
justice and the environment. These values suppress each other:
the stronger someone’s extrinsic aspirations, the weaker his or
her intrinsic goals.
Of course we are not born with our values; they are shaped by
our social environment. By changing our perception of what is
normal and acceptable, politics alters our minds as much as our
circumstances. Free, universal health provision, for example,
tends to reinforce intrinsic values. Shutting the poor out of
health care normalises inequality, reinforcing extrinsic values.
The sharp shift to the right, which in the UK began with
Margaret Thatcher and persisted under Blair and Brown – all
of whose governments emphasised the virtues of competition,
the market and financial success – has changed our values. The
British Social Attitudes survey, for example, shows a sharp fall
over this period in public support for policies that redistribute
wealth and opportunity. And this shift has been reinforced by
advertising and the media.
The media’s fascination with power politics, its ‘Rich Lists’, its
catalogues of the 100 most powerful, influential, intelligent or
beautiful people, its obsessive promotion of celebrity, fashion, fast
cars, expensive holidays: all these inculcate extrinsic values. By
generating feelings of insecurity and inadequacy – which means
reducing self-acceptance – they also suppress intrinsic goals.
Advertisers, who employ large numbers of psychologists, are
well aware of this. Crompton quotes Guy Murphy, global planning
director for the marketing company JWT. Marketers, Murphy
says, “should see themselves as trying to manipulate culture;
being social engineers, not brand managers; manipulating
cultural forces, not brand impressions”. The more they foster
extrinsic values, the easier it is to sell their products.
Right-wing politicians have also, instinctively, understood the
importance of values in changing the political map. Thatcher
famously remarked that “economics are the method; the object is
to change the heart and soul”. Conservatives in the United States
generally avoid debating facts and figures. Instead they frame

Issue 265

issues in ways that both appeal to and reinforce extrinsic values.
Every year, through mechanisms that are rarely visible and seldom
discussed, the space in which progressive ideas can flourish
shrinks a little more.
And the progressive response to this trend has been disastrous.
Instead of confronting this shift in values, we have sought
to adapt to it. Once-progressive political parties have tried to

Extrinsic values concern status and
self-advancement. Intrinsic values
concern relationships with friends,
family and community, and
self-acceptance
appease altered public attitudes: think of all those New Labour
appeals to Middle England, which was often just a code for
self-interest. In doing so they endorse and legitimise extrinsic
values. Many greens and social justice campaigners have also
tried to reach people by appealing to self-interest: explaining
how, for example, relieving poverty in the developing world
will build a market for British products, or suggesting that, by
buying a hybrid car, you can impress your friends and enhance
your social status. This tactic also strengthens extrinsic values,
making future campaigns even less likely to succeed. Green
consumerism has been a catastrophic mistake.
Common Cause proposes a simple remedy: that we stop seeking
to bury our values, and instead explain and champion them.
Progressive campaigners, it suggests, should help to foster an
understanding of the psychology that informs political change
and show how it has been manipulated. They should also come
together to challenge forces – particularly the advertising
industry – that make us insecure and selfish.
The leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Ed Miliband, appears to
understand this need. He told last year’s Labour conference that
he wants “to change our society so that it values community and
family, not just work” and “to change our foreign policy so that
it’s always based on values, not just alliances…We must shed old
thinking and stand up for those who believe there is more to life
than the bottom line.”
But there’s a paradox here, which means that we cannot
rely on politicians to drive these changes. Those who succeed
in politics are, by definition, people who prioritise extrinsic
values. Their ambition must supplant peace of mind, family
life, friendship – and even brotherly love!
So we must lead this shift ourselves. People with strong
intrinsic values must cease to be embarrassed by them. We
should argue for the policies we want, not on the grounds of
expediency but on the grounds that they are empathetic and
kind; and against others, on the grounds that they are selfish
and cruel.
In asserting our values we can then become the change
we want to see.
This is an edited version of an article published in George Monbiot’s
weekly column in The Guardian newspaper. See also www.monbiot.com

11

UN D E R C U R R E N T S  U R B A N VALUES

A Call to

Humility

The contemporary world needs to
free itself from pride and start ‘listening’.
Only then will we design cities fit for
people and Nature, says Václav Havel

Y

ears ago when I used to drive by car from Prague to
our country cottage in Eastern Bohemia, the journey
from the city centre to the sign that marked the city
limits took about 15 minutes, after which came
meadows, forests, fields and villages. These days the exact same
journey takes a good 40 minutes or more, and actually, it is
impossible to know whether I have left the city or not.
What was until recently clearly recognisable as the city is now
losing its boundaries and with them its identity. It has become
a huge overgrown ring of something I can’t find a word for. It
is not a city (as I understand the term), nor suburbs, let alone
a village. Apart from anything else it lacks streets or squares.
There is just a random scattering of enormous single-storey
warehouses, supermarkets, hypermarkets, car and furniture
marts, petrol stations, eateries, gigantic car parks, isolated
high-rise blocks to be let as offices, depots of every kind, and
collections of family homes that are admittedly close together
but are otherwise desperately remote.
And in between all that – and this is something that bothers
me most of all – are large tracts of land that aren’t anything, by
which I mean that they’re not meadows, fields, woods, jungle
or meaningful human settlements. Here and there, in a space
that is hard to define, one can find an architecturally beautiful
or original building, but it is as solitary as the proverbial tomb
– it is unconnected with anything else; it is not adjacent to
anything or even remote from anything; it simply stands there.
The fact is that our cities are being permitted without control
to destroy the surrounding landscape along with its Nature,
replacing it with some sort of gigantic agglomeration that
renders life nondescript.
So where has all this woeful development come from, and
why does it go on getting worse? How is it possible that
humans treat in such a senseless fashion both the landscape
that surrounds them and the very planet they have been given
to inhabit? We know that we are behaving in a suicidal manner,
yet we go on doing it. How can that be?
We are living in the first truly global civilisation. This means
that whatever comes into existence can very quickly span the
whole world.
We are also living in the first atheistic civilisation – in other

12

Connected communities

words, a civilisation that has lost its connection with the
infinite and eternity. For that reason it prefers short-term profit
to long-term gain.
However, the most dangerous aspect of this global atheistic
civilisation is its pride. The pride of someone who is driven by
the very logic of his wealth to stop respecting the contribution
of Nature and our forebears, to stop respecting it on principle
and respect it only as a further potential source of profit. And
indeed, why should a developer go to the trouble of building
a warehouse with several storeys when he can have as much
land as he wants and can therefore build as many single-storey
warehouses as he likes?
Why should he worry about whether his building suits the
locality in which it is built, so long as it can be reached by
the shortest route and can boast a gigantic car park beside it?
What is it to him that between his site and his neighbour’s
there is a wasteland? And what is it to him, after all, that from
an aeroplane the city more and more resembles a tumour
metastasising in all directions? Why should he get worked up

over a few dozen hectares that he carves out of the soil that
many still regard as the natural framework of their homeland?
I sense behind all of this not only a globally spreading shortsightedness, but also the swollen self-consciousness of this
civilisation, whose basic attributes include the supercilious
idea that we know everything and that what we don’t yet know
we’ll soon find out because we know how to go about it. We
are convinced that this supposed omniscience of ours, which
proclaims the staggering progress of science and technology and
rational knowledge in general, permits us to serve anything that
is demonstrably useful, or that is simply a source of measurable
profit; anything that induces growth and more growth and still
more growth, including the growth of agglomerations.
But with the cult of measurable profit, proven progress and
visible usefulness disappears respect for mystery and along with
it humble reverence for everything we shall never measure and
know, not to mention the vexed question of the infinite and
eternal, which were until recently the most important horizons
of our actions.

Issue 265

We have totally forgotten what all previous civilisations
knew: that nothing is self-evident.
I believe that the recent financial and economic crisis was of
great importance and that in its ultimate essence it was actually
a very edifying signal to the contemporary world.
Most economists relied directly or indirectly on the idea
that the world, including human conduct, is more or less
understandable, scientifically describable and hence predictable.
Market economics and its entire legal framework counted on
our knowing what it means to be human and what aims we
pursue, on understanding the logic behind the actions of banks
or firms, what the shareholding public does and what one may
expect from some particular individual or community.
And all of a sudden none of that applied. Irrationality leered
at us from all the stock-exchange screens. And even the most
fundamentalist economists, who – having intimate access to
the truth – had been convinced the invisible hand of the market
knew what it was doing, had suddenly to admit that they had
been taken by surprise.
I hope and trust that the elites of today’s world will realise
what this signal is telling us.
In fact it is nothing extraordinary, nothing that a perceptive
person did not know long ago. It is a warning against the
disproportionate self-assurance and pride of modern civilisation.
Human behaviour is not totally explicable as many inventors of
economic theories and concepts believe; and the behaviour of
firms or institutions or entire communities is even less so.
Naturally, after this crisis a thousand and one theorists will
emerge to describe precisely how and why it happened and
how to prevent it happening in future. But this will not be
a sign that they have understood the message that the crisis
sent us. The opposite, more likely: it will simply be a further
emanation of that disproportionate self-assurance that I have
been speaking of.
I regard the recent crisis as a very small and very inconspicuous
call to humility. A small and inconspicuous challenge for us not
to take everything automatically for granted. Strange things are
happening and will happen. Not to bring oneself to admit it is the
path to hell. Strangeness, unnaturalness, mystery, inconceivability
have been shifted out of the world of serious thought into the
dubious closets of suspicious people. Until they are released and
allowed to return to our minds, things will not go well.
The modern pride that I refer to did not manifest itself in
architecture only recently. In the interwar period many otherwise
brilliant avant-garde architects already shared the opinion that
confident and rational reflection was the key to a new approach
to human settlement. And so they started planning various happy
cities with separate zones for housing, sport, entertainment,
commerce and hospitality, all linked by a logical infrastructure.
Those architects had succumbed to the aberrant notion that an
enlightened brain is capable of devising the ideal city.
Nothing of the sort was created, however. Bold urban projects
proved to be one thing, while life turned out to be something else.

Václav Havel is a playwright and politician. He was President of the
Czech Republic and is a co-founder of Forum 2000. This article is
based on the speech he gave in 2009 at the Forum’s fourteenth annual
conference, where the main topic was Architecture and Urbanism.
www.forum2000.cz

13

UN D E R C U R R E N T S  E C O N O MIC VALUES

MORAL HOUSEKEEPING
Economics is simply a background for moral
values. Get it wrong, and social relations will
collapse, warns Rowan Williams

T

he contribution of theology to economic
decision-making is not only about raising
questions concerning the common
good; questions to do with how this
or that policy grants or withholds liberty for the
most disadvantaged. These are obviously necessary
matters, and a sound theological stress on mutuality,
on the balance of dependence and gift is crucial to
our public discussion of economics. But we need
also to look with the greatest of care at what is being
assumed and what is being actively promoted by
our economic practices about human motivation,
about character and integrity.
This impacts of course on the integrity of business
practice; but it also has to do with assumptions

Economic activity is something people do,
one kind of activity among others; and
as such it is subject to the same moral
considerations as all other activities
about competition, about the priority of work
over family, about what advertising appeals to and
what behaviour is rewarded. If we find, as a good
many commentators and researchers have observed
in recent years, that working practices regularly
reward behaviour that is undermining of family life,
driven or obsessive, relentlessly competitive and
adversarial, we have some questions to ask.
The virtuous life still stands as a model of inhabiting
the world in a way that seeks not to damage or to
control or to avoid cost, but to live what some would
call an ‘adult’ human life – although in fact we can
learn quite a lot about it from children and from
others who do not have to justify themselves in the
world of competitive production.
We urgently need to dust off the ‘language of

14

virtue’ and try and understand why we have left
ourselves so generally deprived of models for
inhabiting the world and this means rescuing the
concept of civic virtue and connecting it with
individual moral wellbeing; including reclaiming
the idea that public life is a possible vocation for the
morally serious person.
The discussion we have embarked on here is not
simply about the theological grounds for a more
just social order, though it is at least that; it is also
a matter of grasping that ‘wellbeing’ involves the
capacity, in the words that some contemporary
philosophers like to use, of bearing one’s own
scrutiny – being able to look at yourself without
despair or contempt.
This is not at all the same as looking at yourself
with complacency or self-congratulation. It is to
do with developing a discerning self-awareness
that is awake to possible corruptions, able to ask
questions of all sorts of emotional and self-directed
impulses, and capable of developing habits of
honest self-examination. It depends not on the
confidence of getting or having got things right
but on the confidence that it is possible steadily to
expose yourself to the truth, whatever your repeated
failures to live in and through it.
Wellbeing entails a dimension of hopeful honesty
which keeps alive the conviction that learning and
change are real in human life and that there can be
a story to be told that will hold a life together with
some sort of coherence. And, so the claim goes,
if this can be nurtured and maintained, it is the
necessary condition for any public involvement that
does not collapse into managerial efforts to balance
warring group interests.
Personal virtue liberates people for civic virtue.
Not that ‘virtuous’ civic life thereby becomes easy or
its choices obvious and uncontroversial; but critical
and self-critical imagination is acknowledged as an

essential aspect of the political enterprise.
As well as working for a global economic order that is just and
mutual, we need habits in the actual workings of the financial
‘industry’ that do not destroy discerning self-awareness and the
capacity for humane relationships. If the nourishing of personal
virtue is one of the things that enable a different kind of politics,
then in turn political and macro-economic decisions should have
in view the degree to which they either support or undermine

Issue 265

the possibilities of virtuous life for particular persons
and their families and small-scale communities.
Economic activity is something people do, one
kind of activity among others; and as such it is
subject to the same moral considerations as all other
activities. It has to be thought about in connection
with what we actively want for our humanity. And
questions about what we want will take us beyond
‘pure’ economic categories just as surely as talking
seriously about politics or technology will take us
outside a narrowly specialised discourse.
Human life is indeed a tapestry of diverse activities,
not reducible to each other. It is not the case that all
motivation is ‘really’ economic, that all relations are
actually to do with exchange and the search for profit.
Yet it can be said with some reason that economics in
the sense of housekeeping is a background for other
things; and because of that it is particularly important
to keep an eye on its moral contours. Get this wrong
and many other things go wrong, in respect of
individual character as well as social relations.
Thus we are bound to look for the sort of language
that will keep our imagination and our critical
faculties alive in this enterprise; that will keep us
alert to the dangers of all sorts of reductionism.
Theology in one way does represent a ‘separate’
frame of reference, one that doesn’t at all depend
on how things turn out in this world for its system
of values. That’s why it is not in competition with
other sorts of discourse. It would be a serious
mistake to claim that there were exhaustive
theological ‘explanations’ for this or that piece of
behaviour which could not be true if you accepted
psychological or economic or neurological accounts.
Yet equally theological descriptions of human
behaviour are not simply an optional gloss on
the iron world of fact. They describe behaviour
in relation to the agency on which everything
depends, the intelligent love which grounds and
preserves all finite interactions. They describe where
in the scheme of reality this or that action, choice
or policy belongs, and thus they direct what we can
say about its value and also indicate where we may
draw resources for following or resisting certain
possibilities. They change what can be said and
imagined about humanity.
This is why theology is so important – so
indispensable, a believer would say – a register for
talking about such a range of activities. It recalls us
to the idea that what makes humanity human is
completely independent of anyone’s judgements of
failure or success, profit or loss. It is sheer gift – sheer
love, in Christian terms. And if the universe itself is
founded on this, there will be no sustainable human
society for long if this goes unrecognised.
This is an extract from the book Crisis and Recovery by Dr
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Larry
Elliott, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ISBN:
9780230252141

15

UN D E R C U R R E N T S  T H E VA L UE OF THE JOURNEY

PILGRIM OR TOURIST?

Every act of travel is a journey into an
intimate landscape, but that response
of intimacy is earthed in the pilgrim, not
in the tourist, writes Peter Owen Jones

his time last year I was walking
towards Hartland to meet Satish and
sleeping in churches and barns. The
year before last I was sent on a tour
of the planet by the BBC for a programme
called Around the World in 80 Faiths, and the year
before that I spent some time alone in the
desert in Egypt and lived for a month with
sadhus in India.
So this year I thought it was high time I
took a holiday. I booked a flight to Santorini,
Greece. I thought I would sort out a room
when I arrived. I took the train to Gatwick
Airport from my nearest station, found the
check-in desk and waited my turn in line.
But the nearer I moved to the front, the more
uneasy I became and just before it was my
turn I slipped under the barrier and walked
back through the airport to the station and
took the next train home.
On the platform I met someone from my
home village and confessed what I had just
done. He looked me in the eye and declared
that he would rather be dragged through the
latrines of Glastonbury on the fourth day than
get on an aeroplane. I returned home, unpacked
my shorts and headed off to the nearest beach,
where I lay down on the shingle and watched
my plane fly off before falling asleep for three
hours. I still don’t know why I did it but it
gave me a window to think about the notion
of why we need to get away to relax, and the
more I considered it, the more perverse and
insubstantial it became.
There is something deep within most of us
that is continually drawn by this distance, and
the history of humanity bears this out in the
slow exodus from Africa. What our ancestors
knew was that over that hill there had never
been a human being before, and for huntergatherers that meant untouched foraging and
hunting where they were guaranteed to be the
first to the food. Maybe it was this that drove
us on into the far reaches of the tundra, and
over miles of ocean in boats no bigger than
tables. The risks were so extraordinary that
our ancestors might as well have been going
to the moon, and we can only admire their
incredible tenacity and spirit.
And still within us there is that urge to
explore beyond. Do you remember doing
it as a child? I do, and what is important to
remember is that whilst as adults we may think
we know our surroundings, children know
that they don’t. I still remember the thrill of
setting out one morning from my home to go
beyond the furthest place in the fields behind
my house that I had ever been before, to go
into what were for me the unknown woods

Issue 265

and fields. What perhaps the computer age has
taken most from our children (and I notice it
in my own children) is the calling to explore.
Yes, the internet does give us the world at our
fingertips, but it is a world without skies!
What drove the purpose of travel after human
beings had found so much of the planet was
trade, and that remains true today; it is the act
of making money that forms the framework for
world travel, whether that is business travel or
tourism, and in any event there is, as far as I can
see, barely any space between them now. We are
effectively charged to visit most countries – it’s
called a visa. And when we do travel, we are
not guests but tourists, and as a result we have
chosen to pay for accommodation rather than
accept true hospitality.
Within the Islamic faith there is a decree
that the traveller is to be housed and fed for
three days without charge, and, believe it or
not, Christians too are supposed to offer the
traveller food and rest. I now feel that with
each new hotel we build we lose another drop
of the milk of human kindness. The idea of
luxury – of paying to be pampered – has been
so very damaging to all of our humanity. Take
a good long look at so-called luxury: it is cold,
so cold. Those long lines of loveless ‘palaces’
strung out along some of the most beautiful
beaches in the world.
The guest room should be the most
important room in all of our houses.
Then over the hill, again in the distance,
there in the folds of the hills is paradise.
Paradise is a very powerful and beautiful idea
within the human heart and psyche. Pilgrims
are in fact journeying always towards it, with
each step the world becoming brighter, more
vivid and more mysterious.
For those of us living in beautiful rain-soaked
England, paradise is presented as a tropical
beach with coconut palms gently leaning over
the white sand beside an aquamarine sea. And
there just above the beach is that little bananaleaf-roofed house where happy people live far
away from the land of winter.
Have you been to paradise? Have you been
to that beach?
I saw it as a child in so many books, and as
a man I went there. You’ll find paradise on the
island of Tanna in the Vanuatu island chain, a
four-hour flight from the east coast of Australia.
Tanna is the most southerly island, and it has
a live volcano. What I loved about visiting the
volcano was the total absence of any healthand-safety notices! The winding and rutted
track led up through increasingly vegetationless
land, where sulphurous smoke was leaching
through the soil. And then to the rim of the

17

crater, which every three minutes would
shower lava high above us.
Captain Cook was the first European
to visit Tanna, mooring his ship in
Resolution Bay, where the entire male
population of the island lined up on
the beach and mooned at him. (He
chose not to go ashore.) At one end of
Resolution Bay lies that village – there,
just behind the sand: small houses with
roughly thatched roofs. There is no
running water and no sanitation, there
are no young people left (they have all
gone to the main town on the island or
further afield), and the poverty can be
measured in flies.
When we in the West travel we take
the West with us – we take our houses
and our cars and our televisions and
our discotheques and our shoes and our
cameras. We carry all of that wherever we
go, and we sometimes transplant what we
think we need in somebody else’s garden.
The Japanese have built an airport on
Tanna, and a German company has built a
hotel. Not that any of the men and women
living on the island could ever afford to
fly or to eat in the hotel’s dining room.
I’m not so sure we are exploring,
really. I think we are still simply looking
for food and hoping to trade. And as long
as we are doing that, yes, we will see the
coral and we will drink in the bars, but
we will miss the miracle of intimacy
because we are not being intimate with
what we are looking at. We are taking
pictures and moving on; we are looking
but we are not seeing. In truth, wherever
we go we are immersed into the intimate
strands of where we are, making every
act of travel a journey into an intimate
landscape. But the response of intimacy
is earthed in the pilgrim, not in the
tourist. The traveller perhaps journeys
towards the pilgrim.
We now live in a world where we still
have to travel to find food, and more and
more of our lives are made what they are
by journeys that other people have made
on our behalf: the journey of the orange,
the journey of the laptop, the journey of
rice and peanuts. Very little of what we
have comes from the land that surrounds
us. But in that sense, with everything
now brought to our door, why do we
still travel? What are we looking for and
hoping to find?
The idea of a holiday is really so very
strange: the notion that we could find
rest and peace and excitement and new

18

colours and new seas. It is the same sun
that sets in Santorini as sets in the UK,
and the sea is one sea simply called by
different names. We travel to get away
from our lives here – our ‘being us here’.
We travel in part still in the search for
paradise, but also because when we take
ourselves to a new place, somehow a little

until we can see the rain as wonderful,
we will never appreciate all the finery of
sunshine. Are we not in danger of being
imprisoned by the very system that we
are told is there to keep us free? Free on
what and whose terms?
The travel industry offers us happiness
paid for by misery. One week’s excitement

We will never see the beauty of somewhere else
until we have realised the beauty of where we are
bit of what is new sinks in, and when we
go away, the relief and the release can be
quite incredible.
I would just ask for some breathing
space now. There is so little time in
our society to reflect on what we have
created and what we are creating. We
have become totally enslaved by money
and held to ransom by ‘the markets’ and
it is as if all of us have surrendered to
that way of thinking. And this is where
we need a completely new political
language – a language that is fluent in
intimacy and awake enough to know
that each act is an act of creation.
So, as I said, I didn’t get the plane. I
stayed home.
One of the greatest illusions we still
buy into is that paradise is there beyond
the horizon. If you spoke to all who
visit the South Downs, where I live, you
would learn that they come here to find
for a while what it is I go to Greece for.
So we are leaving to find ‘it’ and in so
doing have forgotten we are already part
of ‘it’ – it’s here we live in ‘it’. But for
as long as we are content to buy into
the illusion that it is elsewhere, we will
never realise it here. And if our lives are
so dull, so mundane and so bound by the
demands of money that we have to leave
just for a week’s release, then something
is terribly wrong with the manner in
which we are living.
It is a madness that a Spanish waiter
will go to Padstow to stay in a small hotel
for a week and be waited on by a man
who is leaving the following week for
Spain to be waited on by him. What is
going on?
We will never see the beauty of
somewhere else until we have realised
the beauty of where we are. If we
believe we have to travel to a hammock
in Mexico to find peace, the truth is we
will never be at peace where we are. And

in exchange for forty weeks of drudgery.
Of course I applaud the idea of
someone staying in a hotel or a
community that is centred and living
on ecological principles, and the more
of these, the better. In a sense that’s
my greatest hope – that we go away
and experience something of a greater
humanity to all life and return with a
heart full of fine intentions and changed
by the experience, which is one of the
greatest gifts of the pilgrim. We need
a new political language, but I don’t
expect that to come from the politicians.
It needs to be spoken by all of us.
What is missing is the act of taking care of
the traveller: a culture of hospitality that has
been so broken by our collective surrender
to the mass market. I am a Christian and
for me there is a different type of mass –
it is a beautiful word called ‘communion’,
and the true pilgrim is journeying towards
a conscious state of communion.
I feel that the experience of the state
of communion is where we are changed,
and it is the journey into communion that
we have all begun. Resurgence is a magazine
about the new communion – the state of
communion. The green revolution that is
coming cannot just be about the way we
treat the planet: it has to offer not only
a new political language but also a new
social paradigm. Part of that invites all of
us to become better hosts, taking better
care of each other.
As I said, the guest room should be the
most blessed room in our homes.
Peter Owen Jones is an Anglican priest who
has presented various BBC series including
Around the World in 80 Faiths, How to Live a Simple Life,
and Extreme Pilgrim. This article is based on a
talk he gave at the Pilgrim or Tourist? Resurgence
event last October. He will be speaking at the
Resurgence Summer Camp 2011. For details
see www.resurgence.org/summercamp

March/April 2011

The river never drinks its own water.
The tree never tastes its own fruit.
The field never consumes its own harvest.
They selflessly strive for the wellbeing of all those around them.
â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A proverb from Rajasthan

Issue 265

19

UN D E R C U R R E N T S  I N S P I R ATION

MUSIC
FOR

PEACE
Donald Reeves explores how the complex music of
Bach inspires his peace-building work in Bosnia

A

fter eighteen years as Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, I
made it a life’s project to learn to play all the music Bach
wrote for the organ – an unrealistic ambition, as the
work of peace-building has since occupied all my time.
In 2000, I founded The Soul of Europe with a group of friends, to
help those in post-war situations realise Nelson Mandela’s words,
“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work
with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
Peace-building is rather like a journey towards an everreceding horizon. In this journey we are called to imagine
ourselves in a relationship with
our enemies. Peace-building is
a vocation; not so much a goal
to be pursued as a calling to be
heard. It is a prompting born
out of a capacity to bring to both something unforeseen, which
suggests a shared future into which former enemies walk together
towards a horizon striving for community.
These lofty ideas informed my work in Bosnia, as a group of us
encouraged the rebuilding of a Sinan mosque in Banja Luka, one
of 15 destroyed in the Bosnian War. This work was to be a sign of
Muslim–Christian collaboration. Later we responded to an invitation
by the owners of a mine in Omarska, which had been used as a
killing camp, to bring the survivors – all Muslim – together with
Bosnian Serbs to agree on a memorial for those murdered there
during the first years of the war.
Now in Kosovo we are being invited to bring together
Orthodox Serbs in the monasteries of Dec˘ani and Pec´ with the
Kosovo Albanians who live around them. The monasteries stand
isolated in a country that was once part of Serbia. These religious
communities feel threatened and monks and nuns travel with
armed escorts. It is, of course, unacceptable that religious
communities should live like this.

While involved in these tricky endeavours I have persisted
with Bach. The prompting I have described is nourished by the
music I play. Playing the music changes the way in which I see
the world. It redresses the balance from a less bleak view of human
affairs to a more sane and hopeful perspective.
In peace-building this means tackling the long process of
dismantling the ‘victim’ mentality, shared by both those who
suffered and by those who inflicted pain, helping those caught
up in the traumas of conflict, still being waged years after the
war ended, and in addressing the ignorance and cynicism of
international bureaucrats.
Bach’s
organ
music
is
immeasurably
lifeenhancing; saturated with
intimations of hope.
Listening to music is one thing; playing it oneself is
another; performing for others yet another again. After years
of impatience with technical difficulties that pepper Bach’s
scores, I am now realising that learning to overcome these in
order to perform them is like opening the door within a house
containing many treasures. As each difficulty is overcome,
more or less, and complex passages begin to feel safe under
fingers and feet, so more doors open, each one reaching
deeper into the heart of the music, tracking the stream of
Bach’s extraordinary genius to its source.
The source of creativity is an undiscovered country. Virginia
Woolf said: “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls
of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole
stretch of the way. There is virgin forest in each; a snowfield
where even the print of bird’s feet is unknown.”
But it is possible to get close.
In Albert Schweitzer’s seminal study of Bach published in
1911, he writes to those who are performing Bach’s cantatas

(but true for organists also): “Only he
who sinks himself in the emotional
world of Bach, who lives and thinks with
him, who is simple and modest as he, is
in a position to perform him properly.”
At present I am immersed in the
Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes Bach
completed in Leipzig towards the end
of his life. In the Lutheran tradition
the congregation sit while singing
and listen first to the improvisation, a
chorale prelude, which leads into the
hymn. Bach inherited and extended
this tradition. Shortly before he died he
collected, revised and rewrote a selection
of chorale preludes originally composed
some 20 years earlier.
The average length of each piece is

Issue 265

five minutes. They are miniatures in
length only. With astonishing condensed
complexity yet emotional directness Bach
illustrates the words of Lutheran hymns;
he empathises with the words. “To God
the glory” and “Save me, Jesus” are
scrawled across the manuscripts.
The music transcends Lutheranism.
It is not necessary to be a believer to
appreciate the music; however, as a
performer it helps to share this aspect
of Bach’s faith to be able to express the
sheer intensity of these chorale preludes
that makes them so compelling.
Bach’s life was punctuated by the
devastation of death. By the age of 10
he had been orphaned, and thereafter
one member after another of his close

family died. Much of his music reflects a
longing for death, as if death were a way
of escaping his grief and being reunited
with those he loved. Many of the Chorale
Preludes express a longing for peace, for
union with God. Some express grief and
others an ecstatic longing.
But there is more. Bach clearly had
a particular affection for the Gloria.
Schweitzer wrote: “Bach never forgets
the melody is supposed to be an angel’s
song.” Angels herald a new order. They
are here, there and then they are gone.
The Gloria chorale preludes are ravishing
in their lightness and sparkle.
Other chorale preludes are majestic,
exuberant, even defiant. The conclusion
of one, a Fantasia that celebrates the
gifts of the spirit at Pentecost, becomes
a whirlwind, a breathless agitation of a
sixteen-note figure; it ends abruptly with
two flourishes of Hallelujah, as if to say:
“That’s that!”
Robert Schumann tells how his friend
Mendelssohn played Deck My Soul with
Gladness, and said afterwards: “If life were
to deprive me of hope and faith, this single
chorale would replenish me with life.”
Bach’s music is a testimony to the gift
of hope for the human spirit; there is a
quality of anticipation and unfolding as
the music moves forward to resolution.
One of three settings in the Eighteen
of the Advent hymn Come Now, the
Heathens’ Saviour is a heart-stopping
lyrical meditation on the longing for
the coming of Christ. The pedals play a
steady tread, leading the listener into the
mystery of the Incarnation.
Peace-building is not glamorous work.
Peace-building demands boundless
patience and persistence. Setbacks are
frequent. The fundamental inspiration
for peace-building is found among those
who take the risk of sitting together with
their enemies.
Bach’s music is also an inspiration.
His elaborate counterpoint reflects the
complexity of our endeavours, as his
music weaves its way to a logical, simple
and graceful conclusion. That is why I
enjoy learning, playing and performing
his music – whilst working for peace.
Donald Reeves is a Director of The Soul of
Europe (www.soulofeurope.org) and author of
The Memoirs of a ‘Very Dangerous Man’ (Continuum).
If you would like to invite him to give a talk/
recital on Peace-building and Bach please
contact him at donalreeve@aol.com

21

KEY N OT E S  H R H P R I N C E C HARLES

ISLAM
AND THE

ENVIRONMENT

M

any of Nature’s vital, life-support systems are
now struggling to cope under the strain of global
industrialisation. The problems are only going to get
much worse. And they are very real. Over the last
half century, for instance, we have destroyed at least 30% of the
world’s tropical rainforests and in the three years since I started my
Rainforest Project, over 30 million hectares have been lost – and
with them about 80,000 species have disappeared.
When you consider that a given area of equatorial trees
will evaporate eight times more rainwater than an equivalent
patch of ocean, you quickly see how the disappearance of
the rainforests will affect the productivity of the Earth. They
produce billions of tonnes of water every day and without that
rainfall the world’s food security will become very unstable.
But there are other factors too. In the last 50 years our
industrialised approach to farming has degraded a third of the
Earth’s topsoil. We have fished the oceans so extensively that if
we continue at the same rate we are likely to see the collapse of
global fisheries within 40 years and then there are the colossal
amounts of waste that pollute the Earth – the many dead zones
where nothing can live, or those immense rafts of plastic that
now float about in the Pacific.
These are all very real problems and they are the clear results
of the comprehensive industrialisation of life. What is less
obvious is the attitude and general outlook that perpetuate
this dangerously destructive approach. It is an approach that
acts contrary to the teachings of each and every one of the
world’s sacred traditions, including Islam.

W

hether or not we value the sacred traditions as much
as we should, the blunt economic facts make the
predominant approach increasingly irrational and The Economics
of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Study (an interim United Nations report
published in 2008) paints a salutary picture of what we lose
in straightforward financial terms by both our destruction of

22

All the evidence now
points to the fact we
are heading towards
an environmental crisis.
HRH The Prince of
Wales explains why we
will need to draw on
the timeless wisdom of
our sacred traditions –
including Islam – to get
back on the right track

natural systems and the absence of their services to the world.
It is calculated that we destroy around $50 billion-worth of a
system that produces these services every year. By mapping the
loss of those services over a 40-year period, it is estimated that,
in financial terms, the global economy incurs an annual loss of
between 2 and 4.5 trillion dollars – every single year. (To put that
figure into some sort of perspective, the recent crash in the world’s
banking system caused a one-off loss of just 2 trillion dollars.)
Our environmental problems cannot be solved simply by applying
yet more and more of our brilliant green technology – important
though it is. It is no good just fixing the pump and not the well.
And so when we hear talk of an “environmental crisis” or even
of a “financial crisis”, I would suggest that this is actually describing
the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul. It is
a crisis in our relationship with – and our perception of – Nature,
and it is born of Western culture being dominated for at least 200
years by a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific
understanding of the world.
So we need to consider whether a big part of the solution to all
of our worldwide “crises” lies not in more and better technology,
but in the recovery of the soul to the mainstream of our thinking.
Our science and technology cannot do this. Only sacred traditions
can help this happen.
We live within a culture that does not much believe in the
soul any more – or if it does, will not admit to it publicly for
fear of being thought old-fashioned or “anti-scientific”. The
empirical view of the world – the one that measures it and tests
it – has become the only view to believe. A purely mechanistic
approach to problems has somehow assumed great authority
and encouraged the widespread secularisation of society that
we see today.
This is despite the fact that those men of science who founded
institutions like the Royal Society were also men of deep faith and
that a great many of our scientists today profess a faith in God.
And if this is so, why is it that their sense of the sacred has so

March/April 2011

little bearing on the way science is employed to exploit the natural
world in so many damaging ways?
This imbalance – where mechanistic thinking has become
so predominant – goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that
there is nothing in Nature but quantity and motion. This view
continues to frame the general perception of how the world
works and how we fit within the scheme of things. And as
a result, Nature has been completely objectified – “She” has
become an “it”.
Understanding the world from a mechanical point of view
and then employing that knowledge has, of course, always
been part of the development of human civilisation, but as
our technology has become ever more sophisticated and our
industrialised methods so much more powerful, so the level of
destruction is now potentially all the more widespread.
It was that great scientist, Goethe, who saw life as the masculine
principle striving endlessly to reach the “eternal feminine” –
what the Greeks called Sophia, or wisdom. It is a striving, Goethe
said, that is fired by the force of love, which cannot be said of our
striving in the industrialised world, which is far more focused
on the desire for the greatest possible financial profit.
This ignores the spiritual teachings of traditions like Islam,
which recognise that it is not our animal needs that are
absolute; it is our spiritual essence, an essence made for the
infinite. But with consumerism now such a key element in our
economic model, our natural, spiritual desire for the infinite is
constantly being reflected towards the finite.
Our spiritual perspective has been ‘flattened’ and made
earthbound and we are persuaded to channel all of our natural,
never-ending desire for what Islamic poets called “the Beloved”
towards nothing but more and more material commodities.
Unfortunately, we forget that our spiritual desire can never be
completely satisfied. It is rightly a never-ending desire. But when
our desire is focused only on the earthly, it becomes potentially
disastrous. The hunger for yet more and more ‘things’ creates an

Issue 265

alarming vacuum and does great harm to the Earth.
The utter dominance of the mechanistic approach of science
over everything else, including religion, has “de-souled” the

Revelation is a very different kind of
knowing from scientific, evidencebased knowledge
dominant worldview, and that includes our perception of Nature.
As soul is elbowed out of the picture, our deeper link with the
natural world is severed. Our sense of the spiritual relationship
between humanity, the Earth and her great diversity of life has
become ever more diminished.

E

verything in Nature is a paradox and seems to carry within
itself the paradox of opposites. Curiously, this maintains
the essential balance. Only human beings seem to introduce
imbalance. The task then must surely be to reconnect ourselves
with the wisdom found in Nature; a connection which is
stressed by each of the sacred traditions in their own way.
My understanding of Islam is that it warns us that to deny the
reality of our inner being leads to an inner darkness which can
quickly extend outwards into the world of Nature. If we ignore
the calling of the soul, then we destroy Nature. To understand
this we have to remember that we are Nature; we reflect the
universal patterns of Nature.
From what I know of the Qur’an, again and again it describes
the natural world as the handiwork of a unitary benevolent
power. It very explicitly describes Nature as possessing an
“intelligibility” and says there is no separation between Man
and Nature; precisely because there is no separation between the
natural world and God. It offers a completely integrated view

23

of the Universe where religion and science, mind and matter
are all part of one living, conscious whole. We are, therefore,
finite beings contained by an infinitude, and each of us is a
microcosm of the whole. This suggests to me that Nature is a
knowing partner, never a mindless slave to humanity, and we are
Her tenants; God’s guests for all too short a time.
The Qur’an states: “Have you considered: if your water
were to disappear into the Earth, who then could bring you
gushing water?”
This is the Divine hospitality that offers us our provisions and
our dwelling places, our clothing, tools and transport. The Earth
is robust and prolific, but also delicate, subtle, complex and
diverse and so our mark must always be gentle – or the water
will disappear, as it is doing in places like the Punjab in India.
Industrialised farming methods there rely upon the use of
high-yielding seeds and chemical fertilisers, both of which need
a lot more energy and a lot more water as well. As a consequence
the water table has dropped dramatically – I have been there,
I have seen it – so far, by three feet a year. Punjabi farmers are
forced to dig expensive boreholes to get at what remains of the
water. As a result, their debts become ever deeper and the salt
rises to the surface contaminating the soil.
This is not a sustainable way of growing food and maintaining
the wellbeing of communities. It does not respect Divine
hospitality. The costs it incurs will have to be borne by those
who will inherit what is fast becoming the ruined and frayed
fabric of life. For their sake, we must now acknowledge that the
short-term financial gains of a mechanistic approach are too
costly to be allowed to dominate our way of life.
This happens when traditional principles and practices are
abandoned – and with them, all sense of reverence for the
Earth, which is an inseparable element in an integrated and
spiritually grounded tradition like Islam – just as it was once
firmly embedded in the philosophical heritage of Western
thought. The Stoics of Ancient Greece, for instance, held that
“right knowledge”, as they called it, is gained by living in
agreement with Nature, where there is a correspondence or
‘sympathy’ between the truth of things, thought and action.
They saw it as our duty to achieve an attunement between
human nature and the whole of Nature.

F

rom my understanding of its core teachings and
commentaries, the important principle of Islam to keep in
mind is that there are limits to the abundance of Nature. These
are not arbitrary limits, they are the limits imposed by God
and, as such, Muslims are commanded not to transgress them.
Such instruction is hard to square if you base your
understanding of the world on empirical terms alone. After all,
empiricism has proved how the world fits together and told
us it is nothing to do with a “Supreme Being”. There is no
empirical evidence for the existence of God; therefore, QED,
God does not exist. It is a very reasonable, rational argument,
and I presume it can be applied to ‘thought’ as well. After all,
no brain scanner has ever managed to photograph a thought,
nor love, and it never will. Does that mean ‘thought’ and ‘love’
do not exist either?
Clearly there is a point beyond which empiricism cannot make
complete sense of the world. It is one kind of language and a very
fine one, but it is unable to fathom experiences like faith or the
meaning of things – it cannot articulate matters of the soul which

24

is why it consistently ‘elbows’ soul out of the picture.
We do though have other kinds of ‘language’ (as Islam well
knows), and they are much better at dealing with the realm of the
soul and matters of meaning. Each deals with different aspects of
the truth and if you put empiricism, philosophy and the spiritual
perception of life together – just as the Islamic tradition at its
best and richest has always done – they complement each other
rather well.
Islamic writers express this integrated vision so well. Ibn
Khaldu¯n, for instance, taught that “all creatures are subject to a
regular and orderly system. Causes are linked to effects where
each is connected with the other.” And there was the great
Shabistar in 14th-century Persia, who talked of the world being
“a mirror from head to foot, in every atom a hundred blazing
suns where a world dwells in the heart of a millet seed”.
Words that resonate with William Blake’s famous lines, “to
see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.”
Reverence is not science-based knowledge. It is an experience
always mediated by love, sometimes induced by it; and love
comes from relationship. This, then, is why the wisdom and

Tradition is the accumulation of
the knowledge and wisdom that
we should be offering to the
next generation
learning offered by a sacred tradition like Islam matters –
and why those who hold and strive to preserve their sacred
traditions in different parts of the world have every reason to
become more confident of their ground.
The Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest
treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge
available to humanity. It is both Islam’s noble heritage and a
priceless gift to the rest of the world. And yet, so often, that
wisdom is obscured by the drive towards Western materialism
– the feeling that to be truly “modern” you must ‘ape’ the West.
To counter this, I have done what I can with my School of
Traditional Arts to nurture and support traditional and sacred
craft skills – not least those of Islam – because they keep alive a
perspective that we sorely need. The geometry and patterning
taught at the School form the basis of crafts that have been
all but abandoned in many parts of the world, including the
Islamic world. This is a tragedy of monumental proportions
because these principles reflect the ‘spiritual mathematics’
found everywhere in Nature.
As Islam teaches, it is a patterning that reflects the very
ground of our being. It is the Divine imagination, so to speak;
the ineffable presence that is the sacred breath of life. As the
17th-century mysticʿIbn Ashir puts it, by the practice of these
arts you “see the One who manifests in the form, not the form
by itself”.
For many in the modern world this is hard to understand
because the view of God has become so distorted. “God” is seen
as being, somehow, outside “His” creation, rather than part of
its unfolding – what the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas called “the
force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. Being the
principle that underlines the Cosmos, the Cosmos is the result

March/April 2011

of God knowing it and of it knowing the uncreated
God. Notice the emphasis there on ‘un’-created. It is
of profound importance. The basis of all existence is
in this relationship.
I suspect the reason why this is such a very
unfashionable view is that the deep-seated experience of participation in the living, creative
presence of God is offered to us in all traditions not
by empiricism, but by revelation. This is a rare and
precious gift and only given to those whose supreme
humanity and capacity for great humility achieves a
mastery over the ego.
This, of course, is not deemed possible from an
empirical point of view, but revelation is a very
different kind of knowing from scientific, evidencebased knowledge. And by dismissing and discarding
what it offers to humankind, we throw away an
important lifeline for the future.
Once you do blend the two languages – the
empirical and the spiritual – you begin to wonder
why the sceptics think the desire to work in harmony
with Nature is so unscientific. Why is it deemed so
worthwhile to abandon our true relationship with
the ‘beingness’ of all things; to limit ourselves to
the science of manipulation, rather than immerse
ourselves in the wider science of understanding?
They seem such spurious arguments, because, as
Islam clearly understands, it is actually impossible
to divorce human beings from Nature’s patterns
and processes. The Qur’an is considered to be the
“last Revelation” but it clearly acknowledges which
book is the first – the great book of creation, of
Nature herself, which has been taken too much for
granted in our modern world and which needs to
be restored to its original position.
With all this in mind, I would like to set a
challenge to mobilise Islamic scholars, poets and
artists, as well as those craftsmen, engineers and
scientists who work with and within the Islamic
tradition, to identify the general ideas, the teachings
and the practical techniques within the tradition
which encourage us to work with the grain of
Nature rather than against it. I would urge you
to consider whether we can learn anything from
the Islamic culture’s profound understanding of
the natural world to help us all in the fearsome
challenges we face.
Whichever faith tradition we come from, the
fact at the heart of the matter is the same. Our
inheritance from our creator is at stake. It will be
no good at the end of the day as we sit amidst
the wreckage, trying to console ourselves that it
was all done for the best possible reasons; the
development and the betterment of humankind.
The inconvenient truth is that we share this planet
with the rest of creation for a very good reason –
and that is, we cannot exist on our own without
the intricately balanced web of life around us.
Islam has always taught this and to ignore that
lesson is to default on our contract with Creation.

The Modernist ideology that has dominated the Western outlook for
a century implies that “tradition” is backward looking. That is far from
true. Tradition is the accumulation of the knowledge and wisdom that we
should be offering to the next generation. It is, therefore, visionary – it
looks forward.
Turning to the traditional teachings, like those found in Islam that define
our relationship with the natural world, does not mean locking us into
some sort of cultural and technological immobility. As the English writer
G.K. Chesterton put it, “real development is not leaving things behind, as
on a road, but drawing life from them as a root”.
The writer C.S. Lewis once pointed out that “sometimes you do have to
turn the clock back if it is telling the wrong time” – that there is nothing
“progressive” about being stubborn and refusing to acknowledge that we
have taken the wrong road. If we realise that we are travelling in the wrong
direction, the only sensible thing to do is to admit it and retrace our
steps back to where we first went wrong. As Lewis put it, “going back can
sometimes be the quickest way forward”. It is the most progressive thing
we could do.
All of the mounting evidence is telling us that we are, indeed, on the
wrong road, so you might think it would be wise to draw on the timeless
guidance that comes from our intuitive sense of the origin of all things
to which we are rooted. Nature’s rhythms, her cycles and her processes,
are our guides to this uncreated, originating voice. They are our greatest
teachers because they are expressions of Divine Unity. Which is why there
is a profound truth in that seemingly simple, old saying of the nomads –
that “the best of all Mosques is Nature herself”.
This is an edited extract from a speech given by HRH The Prince of Wales in
Oxford last summer to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Oxford Centre for
Islamic Studies, of which he is Patron.

25

Living in Earth
N

Wind Vortices can be seen at the Eco-Art show at the Pori Art
Museum, Pori, Finland, from 4 Feb – 29 May.
The show represents legendary and contemporary land and
environmental artists. See www.poriartmuseum.fi
To learn about how this image was made, please see
www.resurgence.org

26

ot so long ago, each morning, school assemblies in Britain
reverberated with children chanting the Lord’s Prayer:
“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done,
On Earth, as it is in Heaven...”
A switch in one letter, ‘o’ to ‘i’, turns the ‘on Earth’ to ‘in
Earth’ as it was in the older form of the prayer. “Thy Kingdom
come, Thy will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven.” Recite it
anew, and suddenly a small seed sparkles.
In the version most of us are familiar with Heaven is a place apart,
a pure essence in which hopefully we live after death; a cloudy
enveloping all-consuming space of the purest, brightest light.
Earth is solid and inanimate, a place on which we dwell. On
top, cut away from, disconnected – and apart from the Divine.
When we switch to ‘in Earth’ everything is suddenly
included. It is all in Earth, made of Earth, part of Earth –
laughing Earth’s laugh. The origins and essence of these two
words, ‘on’ and ‘in’, are ‘upon’ and ‘within’.

March/April 2011

Wind Vortices, Sky Blu, Antarctica 2007, by Chris Drury

For so long we have been up and on
Earth, supported by, above and superior.
Heaven we strive and hope to be with
and in. Earth, matter, we move away from
so she can be used without empathy.
If we are within Earth, we are with and in.
Humble. And this humility lowers our head
from up high and down to Earth, softly and
shyly with modesty. We go down on our
knees and with head to Earth we pray.
It is not about superiority, inferiority
or even equality. We are not apart, but
embedded in Earth. The rain lashes
us; we wade through mud, ice, snow,
swim in seas and rivers; breezes brush
up against us, unseen but felt; we run
through deep meadow grasses, sink

Issue 265

into sandy beaches, shelter in caves and
homes of wood, earth, ice. And of course
we eat Earth’s generous gifts.
Death eventually takes our bodies
back into Earth – consumed in flames,
dissolved into rivers and oceans, eaten
by birds, worms, microbes and finally
disappearing back into Earth – any hint
of separation gone. We are in Earth.
Living in Earth, being totally composed
of it, we feel its pain, as well as its
rippling joy. The joy of in-Earthness is
easily understood. Small moments of
great joy in Nature are treasures we have
had. Such incredible moments are gifts
to be cherished.
Life and humanity are crying out for

the right relations between humans and
Earth. Echoing the lines of the Lord’s
Prayer, may Thy will be done in Earth.
It is as though Earth is asking us to see
ourselves as part of her.
Words are powerful; they shape our
consciousness, our ways of experiencing
and so behaving. So what if we said
in Earth, rather than on, routinely in
everyday life as well as in our prayers for
healing and justice?
It is one simple change: an ‘i’
replacing an ‘o’. Then back within Earth,
reconnected and full of joy. Life flows.
– Yasmine Khan
Clinical Psychologist and writer

27

REG U L A R S  P RO J E C T I O N S

The Secret of Kells

Image: France 2 Cinéma

Wild Nature
It was his love of the vivid portrayal of wild Nature
in cinema that first sparked the idea for a Resurgence
film column, says Caspar Walsh. Here, he identifies
those films where Nature is the true star

I

’ve held a slack-jawed awe for wilderness-based movies
and documentaries since I was a kid. Films including
Grizzly Adams, The Call of the Wild, Tarzan, anything David
Attenborough touched and all of Jacques Cousteau’s
deep-sea exploration. What I’ve seen on the screen over the
decades has inspired me to seek adventure outdoors on the
hills and moors, up mountains, in forests, along rivers and
in plenty of oceans. What I’ve learnt from cinema and TV has
instilled in me a respect and healthy fear of the wild places.
The films featured in this issue remind me that I’m not
alone with my passion for vivid wild landscape and the
way it so often mirrors back the tricky inner terrain I
traverse in my search for the answers to life’s big questions.
Some of these movies are a reminder of my own place in
wild Nature. Some are simply about reconnection to the
soul food that keeps me going on the journey.
So here is a very personal selection of contemporary
wilderness films that have opened my heart and blown
me away. Watch them and decide for yourself.
Into the Wild (2007) is actor Sean Penn’s powerful
directorial debut based on the diary of wilderness

28

wanderer Christopher McCandless, a man paradoxically
searching for a connection with his family through the
isolation of wilderness. Lovingly shot, edited, scripted
and scored, it entered the top 500 best movies of all time
soon after its release. I became so immersed in the story
that I had that rare gift of forgetting I was in the cinema.
Into the Wild is a clear warning of the reality and danger
of a reckless engagement with wilderness and, if we’re
lucky, the healing it can provide – a healing McCandless
discovered with tragic consequences.
The Secret of Kells (2009). Animation features are gaining
increased credibility as mainstream contenders for the
Oscars. This is one of them. It is based on the story of
St Brendan and the creation of the Book of Kells. The
monastery of the title is surrounded by a wild forest
strictly out of bounds to our hero. Wild Nature is seen
from the high monastery walls as the threshold he
must cross to complete his true-to-life adventure as
the co-creator of an iconic and stunning spiritual text.
Many less cinematic movies can wait for DVD, but this
had to be seen on the big screen. I was mesmerised by

March/April 2011

the lush animation, and lit up by the way Brendan befriends
wild Nature to find the strength, skill and support needed to
complete his hero’s journey. Folklore and fable nourish in ways
that reconnect and make life much richer. The Secret of Kells does
this in spades. Watch, and watch again. Definitely a family film.
The Road (2009) depicts a future that, in the current climate,
is frighteningly feasible. A father and son travel through a postapocalyptic landscape in search of food, shelter and safety. The
journey takes them through a dead world where no crops
grow, and much of their time is spent fleeing free-roaming
cannibals. The father’s unflinching commitment to protect his
son from danger is deeply moving: a flickering light amid the
savage darkness of a broken society. This is a grim warning of
one road we could be and perhaps already are heading down.
Mercifully, it shines a light through the story of the son. It tells
me that even in the darkest times, there is always hope.
Grizzly Man (2005). This is a fascinating and deeply
harrowing documentary which haunted me for weeks. It is
the true story of Timothy Treadwell, a lover of wild bears
to the point of obsession. This unhinged adrenaline junkie
video-diaried his 13 seasons spent living with grizzlies and
brown bears in the wilds of Alaska. Werner Herzog, a prolific
filmer of wild Nature, took on the task of putting together
the rescued footage after Treadwell’s death. Treadwell believed
he had a special relationship with wild bears. Perhaps he did,
but the horror and tragedy of his death seemed inevitable.
The film made it very clear that on her turf, Nature is not to
be underestimated and that in authentic wilderness, we are
seldom top of the food chain.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3) needs little introduction.

A group of films I revisit regularly to reawaken me
from any slumber I may have slipped into when
it comes to my awareness of wild Nature and the
central role it plays in my life. This epic saga tells
me what can happen if I drift off the path of
consciousness back into a convenient, head-in-thesand sleep. Inspired by Tolkien’s love of wild Nature
and the despair he felt at the industrialisation of
his treasured home turf in the West Midlands, the
battle humans wage against Nature lies at the heart
of this tale. It is a story for any age of the destruction

Even in the darkest times,
there is always hope
humankind wreaks across the planet. The distance
the historical fantasy narrative gives us allows us to
be drawn into a world where characters like Gollum
sneak up on us and hold up a mirror to us of a
world we know exists today.
What strikes me in all these films is the central,
essential relationship we have with Nature and how
humans so often underestimate the power she holds
over humankind’s life and death. There is a clear
and obvious consequence that awaits anyone who
deludes themselves into thinking they have ultimate
control over any aspect of wild Nature, from the
animals that roam her landscape to the elemental
forces that shape and create the continents and
climates. We may experience short-term wins in
terms of easy resources and quick-fix food but in
the long run, if we disconnect, take more than we
need, and forget our place in the chain of evolution
and life, we will always lose.
Movies about wilderness and wild Nature hold
a global fascination big enough for money-hungry
film execs to green-light even the biggest productions
– not all of them worth watching. Done well, they
serve as a reminder to us of our place on the planet,
which is not as the unquestioned dominant species
with an Earth-given right to take what we want;
and they serve as a reminder that so many of us so
easily forget that our survival is inextricably linked
to our relationship with and respect for the Earth
and everything that lives on it. Ultimately, when
viewed beyond the entertainment of a good story
well told, films on wild Nature inspire us to change,
and remind us that we are not alone and that at our
centre, beyond our destructive fears, lie a deep love
and respect for all things wild.
Become a part of the Projections dialogue. What films
about wild Nature have inspired you and continue to
inspire you? See Caspar’s blog at www.resurgence.org and
post a comment.
Caspar Walsh is film editor for Resurgence, and a journalist,
author and wilderness teacher. His novel Blood Road is
available in paperback. www.casparwalsh.co.uk

The Secret of Kells

Issue 265

Image: France 2 Cinéma/Album/AKG

29

REG U L A R S  V E G E TA R I A N F OODIE

Breaking Bread
As a recent convert from vegetarianism to veganism
Jane Hughes is learning she will need nerves of steel
to resolve the question ‘to be or not to be a vegan?’

T

Illustration: Liz Rousell

hree months into my vegan
experiment, I hit a snag.
Staying at my mum’s house
for a weekend, I found myself
completely unable to ‘come out’ as a vegan,
and so simply ate the ‘special cheese’ and
butter she had laid in for me. What does
this say about me? That my commitment
to veganism isn’t strong enough to make
me deserving of the name? That I’m
embarrassed to be a vegan? That I consider
accepting my mother’s hospitality with
good grace more important than sticking
to my dietary principles? Yes, probably all
these, and more.
I ate the cheese, and the butter, and
it was interesting. I didn’t feel sick, or

30

mentally sickened by my own behaviour.
I didn’t have a revelatory moment when
I realised that dairy food tastes fantastic
and I’d be a fool to stop eating it. I didn’t
feel particularly guilty, which pleased
me because I wouldn’t like my veganism
to be driven by guilt. Guilt is rarely a
sustainable reason not to eat something.
I did feel slightly disappointed that dairy
food didn’t taste better – after all this
time, it was nothing special.
It struck me as silly to be creating a
big taboo for myself, because doing so
somehow elevates the forbidden thing
into something that you wish you could
have. I suppose it might have been an
awful anticlimax if I had managed to be
the purest possible vegan for years and
years, and had then had a crisis over a
cheese toastie. Best to crack early, find
out you’re not missing much, and move
on, rather than nursing a dreadful secret
craving that must never be fulfilled.
That’s one of my excuses.
There has been a flurry of letters to The
Vegetarian magazine concerning ‘so-called’
vegetarians who sometimes eat meat. This
arises from Yotam Ottolenghi’s comment
that there are plenty of ‘pragmatic’
vegetarians who, whilst rarely eating fish
or meat, are not entirely repulsed by the
notion. Thus we find ourselves with chefs
and acquaintances who seem to think
that vegetarianism is more of a whim
than a commitment, and bristle with
indignation if a vegetarian won’t just chill
out and eat what everyone else is eating
for once.
Personally, barring the onset of a
catastrophic personality disorder, I can’t
see myself ever eating meat or fish again,
but I don’t yet feel that way about eggs
and dairy. I shy away from confessing
that I’m eating vegan, and that’s partly
because I’m not convinced in my own
mind that I will never again eat a lemon
meringue pie. I’m not ready to seize the
moral high ground, as I know that I may
have to beat an ignominious retreat.

March/April 2011

Eating vegan at home isn’t particularly difficult, although the
range of recipes available to me has been drastically cut. It has been
interesting to see which of our regular dishes are already more or less
vegan (veggie sausage and mash, chilli bean wraps, beans on toast,
Chinese and Indian dishes), which can be successfully modified
(we have had limited success with muffins and pancakes), which
vegan alternatives just don’t work for me (vegan cheese substitutes
of all kinds – ghastly and miserable) and which foods I really miss. I
thought it would be butter. Turns out to be Heinz Cream of Tomato
Soup, a comfort food since I was little. Sob.
Shopping for food has become a very time-consuming affair
– I guess it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, but I’m still
learning what I can and can’t have. Eating out is a different
matter, and so difficult that we’ve more or less stopped doing
it. There’s precious little joy to be extracted from a plate of
pasta in tomato sauce. Especially as the pasta might be made
with eggs. That’s another aspect of veganism that has taken me
by surprise. As a vegetarian, I can be reasonably sure, just by
scanning a menu, which dishes will be suitable for me. It’s
pretty obvious, generally, if something contains meat or fish,
and you can have a shrewd guess at whether things are likely to
contain beef stock or gelatine. It turns out to be far, far harder
to guess which dishes might contain traces of milk or eggs.
I’ve asked around, and most people seem to think vegetarians
are basically OK – possibly misguided, a bit faddy, pathetically
unable to stomach the ‘realities’ of Nature (red in tooth and claw!),
or soft, sweet, slightly infantile people whose delicate sensibilities
need to be protected. The same people seem to believe that
vegans are difficult. Vegans, apparently, are provocative, aggressive,
‘political’ and, well, just taking it all too far.
Recently I attended a very thought-provoking two-day
conference on food, culture and sociology at the Institute
for Cultural Research in London. Food writer and historian
Elisabeth Luard gave me cause for reflection when she raised
the proposition that people who will not eat with other people
are not to be trusted. If you will not accept food, you are not
a friend. Bringing your own food to a dinner is an insult to
the host, and leaving before the meal is over is downright
disturbing. Breaking bread together is an age-old ritual closely
associated with trust, bonding and peace-making. Taking
somebody out for dinner is a standard part of the modern
mating dance. Eating out is problematic because I don’t trust
people to get it right when it comes to vegan food, and I don’t
trust people not to take against me for even mentioning it – so
right away, we’re on rocky ground.
My best friend put her finger on it – when I told her I was
vegan her words were: “Oh dear, how antisocial.” Last time we
went out together, I gave in and ate a pizza. Afterwards, she had
regrets. I didn’t, not really, because from my perspective, at that
time and on that day, putting my friend at ease and enjoying
food together felt more important than making a stand against
the dairy industry.
I might live to regret saying this, but at this stage in my
evolving dietary consciousness, I’m still putting the comfort
and happiness of my friends and family before my own dietary
principles. What a cliff-hanger – will I still be vegan in two
months’ time? Watch this space!
Jane Hughes is editor of The Vegetarian magazine, for the Vegetarian
Society.

Issue 265

Partybrot
Traditionally, this German bread is made with milk
and glazed with egg, so I’ve taken some liberties to
create this beautiful ‘tear-and-share’ loaf. Basically, you
need to make smallish quantities of two bread doughs:
one white and one wholemeal. The recipes can be any
favourites that have worked well for you in the past,
so if you’re an experienced bread-maker, feel free to
customise with seeds, left-over cooked grains, herbs,
etc.The point is that you then roll each batch of dough
into small balls, lay them out in an attractive alternating
pattern in a greased baking tin, and decorate as you
see fit before baking to aromatic perfection.
For the white dough:
½ tsp easy-blend dried yeast
250g strong white bread flour
1 tsp sugar
½ tsp salt
20g vegan margarine
150ml water

For the wholemeal dough:
as above, but with wholemeal flour

✽ If using a breadmaker, load the ingredients into it in the

order they are listed, set it to make dough but not bake,
and off you go. (Some machines prefer wet ingredients
first – you’ll know if yours is one of those, so adjust
your behaviour accordingly.) If making by hand, first
mix together the flour, dried yeast, sugar and salt. (This
approach only works if you use the kind of easy-action
yeast that does not need to be activated in water first!
Check the packet.) Then rub in the margarine. You’ll
need the water you use to be warm. Add it gradually
to create a kneadable dough, then knead by hand for
10 minutes or so. Make up both batches of dough, and
then you can progress straight to making the dough
balls.

✽ Lightly grease a 25cm springform or loose-based cake

tin. Cut one batch of dough into 9 pieces and the other
batch into 10, roll each piece into a smooth ball and
arrange the balls attractively in the baking tin. Cover
with oiled cling film and leave in a warm place to rise
for 20-30 minutes while the oven warms up – it needs
to be set to 200 °C/400 °F/Gas Mark 6.When the dough
is puffed up, brush it with soya milk and sprinkle with
seeds of your choice. Bake for 25-30 minutes until
golden. Leave for 5 minutes to cool in the tin, then turn
onto a wire rack to cool – or serve warm!

Breaking bread together is an age-old
ritual closely associated with trust,
bonding and peace-making
31

e calls it the last gasp of a dying society,
but for Rajagopal Puthan Veetil there is
no use going quietly. “We may succeed,
we may fail, but at least we will have
the satisfaction of doing something before we go,”
he laughs. The “society” the 62-year-old talks of
is India, and the “last gasp” being taken is that of
the country’s half-billion poor people – the men,
women and children Rajagopal has campaigned
alongside for much of his life.
Rajagopal grew up in Kerala and was born just one
year after India gained independence. But in the years
since then, dreams of an equal, prosperous nation
have slowly faded. “After all this time,” he says,
“government after government has continued on one
path, and that has been to push the interests of the
poor people to the wall in the interests of the few.”

He plans to take 100,000 people on
a march to Delhi, and he wants the
world to listen
I first met Rajagopal in 2003 in the battered
eastern state of Chhattisgarh, where he was
embarking on a month-long protest march. Under
the shadow of a statue of Gandhi in the dusty town
centre of Raipur, he stood addressing a small crowd.
His diminutive shoulders were draped in petal
garlands and he spoke of the need for India’s poor

32

to mobilise themselves using nonviolent methods
to protect their land and livelihoods.
Back then, India was marching towards economic
supremacy. Today it is galloping. But India’s poor
care little for GDP, and Rajagopal says: “The trickledown of wealth that was promised them hasn’t
trickled down. In fact, wealth has trickled up – to the
multinationals and the banks – much of it profit from
the resources beneath poor people’s feet.”
As large-scale industries have been heartily
welcomed into India, the rate at which the
people’s natural resources have been hijacked has
mushroomed. Minerals, mountains, rivers, forests
and farmland have all been exploited and as the
divide between the rich and the poor has widened,
the space for democratic engagement has narrowed.
In many areas civil war has erupted as the government
attempts to quell pockets of violence instigated by
Maoist rebels – known as Naxalites – who claim to be
fighting for the poor, mainly tribal people and against
those seeking to deprive them of their land.
“The Naxalites are promoting violence and so
is the state, and my organisation is operating in the
decreasing space between military and private armies,
trying to create a gap for nonviolence to grow,”
Rajagopal explains. “It’s silence or violence. Either
people submit completely or they take a gun and shoot
– that means less and less opportunity for a third way.”
The third way is embodied in the organisation
Rajagopal founded in 1991, called Ekta Parishad.
Today it is India’s only mass people’s movement
dedicated to empowering people at the grassroots
to fight for their land with Gandhian techniques
of nonviolence. And whilst many in India now see
Gandhi as an outmoded icon, Rajagopal insists his
teachings remain the “most modern tool to deal
with the world’s problems”.
In 2007 Ekta Parishad staged Janadesh (‘The
People’s Verdict’), which saw 25,000 people
marching 340km from Gwalior to Delhi to demand
action on land reform. Janadesh has been the
organisation’s biggest-ever action to date, and it
resulted in the government setting up the National
Land Reforms Council and the Committee on Land
Reforms. But whilst the march was successful in
giving poor people the confidence to challenge

March/April 2011

Janadesh march in 2007

the state, progress over land reform has
been slow. That said, in Madhya Pradesh,
where Ekta Parishad started, over 80,000
families have received land as a result
of this protest. Rajagopal acknowledges
that government often works only
under the pressure of money power and
muscle power. “It is therefore all the
more important for organisations like
Ekta Parishad to continue pushing for
justice,” he says.
The long haul is reflected in Rajagopal’s
own history of struggle, which stretches
back to the 1970s. A former agriculture
student, he began working in the lawless
Chambal valley, rehabilitating bandits
who had long controlled the area. Under
the tutelage of veteran Gandhian Subba
Rao, he worked to build trust and bring
about the bandits’ surrender, often in
hostile conditions. “I remember the day
they cut me up badly,” he says. “They
said, ‘Leave this place, otherwise we will
kill you.’ We could have gone, but we
said ‘No’, and the respect of the bandits
grew,” he adds, recalling the long process

of helping to bring the band of poor
and disaffected people back from the
margins of society.
It is his sheer defiance that, for more
than 30 years, has helped to free bonded
labourers from servitude and to secure
land for families whose lives have been
threatened by industrialisation, corrupt
government and unscrupulous landowners.
And using Ekta Parishad as an umbrella
organisation, Rajagopal has helped train
thousands of rural young people to gather
themselves to fight for their land and for
access to water, forest and other resources.
His own tireless efforts are coupled
with an unshakeable faith in the quiet
but determined power of nonviolence – a
reawakening of the radicalism of Gandhian
thought. And while India remains the
primary stage for his campaigns, he sees
his next large-scale action – set for 2012 –
as having a global impact. He plans to take
100,000 people on a march to Delhi, and
he wants the world to listen.
“When you speak about the IMF or the
World Bank or multinational companies,

you are not just speaking about an
Indian reality,” he explains. “Pressure
needs to be exerted on all those bodies
and organisations trying to influence
governments to act in one direction.
What is happening is that government
and multinationals are on one side and
people and social movements are on the
other. It’s a battlefield.”
The arguments of Ekta Parishad may not
wake everyone up, Rajagopal says, but if
the movement couples words with actions,
“somebody may take notice or begin to
respect us.
“Across the world people are dying,
communities and religious organisations
are dying and the market is taking over.
We are dying too, but before we do, can
we make some noise? I believe it is our
duty to do so.”
Helena Drakakis is Assistant Editor of the Big
Issue magazine. She has spent time in India
documenting the work of Ekta Parishad. For
further information on Ekta Parishad visit
www.ektaparishad.com

33

REG U L A R S  S L OW T R AV E L

A Holy Pilgrimage
Alighting from a long, slow bus ride to the sacred source
of the Ganges, Charles V. Clark had a peculiar feeling he
was on the brink of an important discovery

“

What took you so long to get to India?” The swami
regarded me with an amused gleam in his eye.
Below us the Ganges, or Bhagirathi, as it is called at
that point, boiled through the glistening ravine,
knowing no respite as it carried its timeless message down
through the world’s greatest mountain range to the ocean
at Ganga Sagar, 1,500 miles away in the Bay of Bengal. I had
turned 40, it was true, yet here I was, a solitary wanderer,
some 20 years after the trickle of seeking, footloose
Westerners became a tide, ebbing and flowing across the
subcontinent and Southeast Asia in the 1970s.

Could this be the lesson we hurrying,
anxious Westerners might learn from
India: how to be here and now?
Wisps of greyish cloud were beginning to drift over
the blindingly white peaks, which seemed as if they
hung upon the air. I sensed another cold night at 10,000
feet as I watched two specks, eagles, circling, climbing
and drifting on the thermals through the pale, earlyevening sun. I was now just two days’ walk from my goal,
Gaumukh, higher still in the Himalayas, and humble
source of India’s most sacred river.
Fingering his plaited, rat’s tail beard, the swami
outlined his own life’s pilgrimage: “I was an engineer
for many years…I could go anywhere, had family.” He
spoke in a measured way. “Then I gave it all up. At the
age of 40, I gave away all my possessions and took a train
to Haridwar, where I threw all my money in the river,
walked to Gangotri and became a monk.”
I listened intently as he gestured toward his tiny,
tranquil garden. “Now that I have nothing,” he
continued, “life is so much simpler!” His laughter
mingled with the river’s rush and his bundled dreadlocks
danced like a jolly family of ferrets.
A few weeks earlier I had left Delhi, some 200 miles to
the south, by midnight bus, heading, also via Haridwar,

34

for Rishikesh. If all goes well, such a journey takes around
seven hours. But such transport is often in an advanced
state of decrepitude and is prone to making sudden and
inexplicable stops – often for very long periods. But I
wanted to travel the way the people did, and it seemed
a more colourful means of getting around India than
taking a deluxe-sleeper coach, with no guarantee of sleep.
Upon discovering at a roadside dhaba, or café, that
the sole foreigner on board had similar aspirations
to themselves, a group of Hindu pilgrims insisted on
ushering me to a privileged seat in the driver’s cab, where
I alternately dozed or chatted the remaining hours of the
journey away with his two blanket-shrouded companions.
Despite the sleepless hours, I found, on disembarking
from the bus in Rishikesh, my senses instantly responding
to the sounds and new visual impressions around me. I
felt totally present in each moment. With each intake of
breath it was as if I was on the brink of some important
discovery, if only I knew what it was.
With its graceful, forested hills on either side and many
ashrams and spiritual retreats lining both sides of the
onrushing Ganges, it is not for nothing that Rishikesh
has long been known as the ‘city of seers’. It is one of the
holiest pilgrim towns in Uttar Pradesh and I was soon
aware of lines of men and women, many from far-off
towns and villages, marching barefoot through the streets
to make puja at the temples and pay homage to the holy
river, ‘Mother Ganga’. Some however – myself included
– used the town as a staging post en route to the more
remote sanctuaries of the Garhwal Himalayas, as the
region is known.
On a visit in 1929, Gandhi was moved to comment:
“peace, which is the final end for the soul, dwells in these
shrines of the Garhwal”. Enclosed between the Gangetic
plain to the south and the frozen plateau of Tibet to the
north, it is not so long since these remote areas could
only be approached on foot or horseback.
The old footpaths or yatra trails see few travellers these
days. However, I felt a strong urge to honour the old ways

March/April 2011

and walk at least a sizeable portion of the way to
Gangotri, still two days and over 200km up the
river from Rishikesh. Devaprayag, about 70km away
and an important pilgrim township standing at the
junction of the rivers Alaknanda and Bhagirathi, was
the obvious choice.
Compared with Nepal, the Indian Himalayas
are relatively undeveloped as far as lodgings are
concerned, which may leave the foot-traveller
spending the night in some unlikely places. On
my first night for example, I slept on a woodframed charpoy, or rope bed, in the back room of
a wayside hut. In the darkness it was a little while
before I realised I was sharing the room with a
horse! Another night I drowsed away by a riverside
campfire, having been welcomed to the circle by a
cheerful group of Tehri hill shepherds tending their
large, mixed flock of goats and sheep. I had walked
12 hours that day. A bright moon cast a silvery glow
across the river and the forested crags above. In the
overpowering stillness it was easy to believe that the
spirits of the ancient yogis dwelt there, and at any
moment one of India’s countless deities might step
softly into that sylvan scene.
After Devaprayag, I took another local bus for
seven hours, getting out at Uttarkashi, the ‘temple
town’, and the capital of the westernmost district
of Uttarakhand, which fringes India’s border with
Tibet. The air was already noticeably cooler. At
daybreak and dusk, the temples and shrines of this
township of about 12,000 are alive with the tinkling
of bells and chanted prayers: you truly begin to feel
you have entered the ‘land of the gods’. Today you
can easily hire a jeep-taxi for the final 100km from
Uttarkashi to the roadhead at Gangotri – but it costs
about five times the local bus fare.
A dawn start saw me perched amongst the
bedrolls and tin trunks on the roof of another
‘biscuit tin on wheels’. A soldier cautioned me to
keep my head well down, and I was soon to discover
why. At regular intervals in the Bhagirathi valley
the road is criss-crossed by low-hanging telegraph
wires; higher in the mountains, vigilance became
even more essential as we bounced beneath massive
rock canopies where the tiny road had been blasted
across perpendicular cliffs. After about 60km we
were brought to an abrupt halt by a huge rock
avalanche blocking the road. I abandoned the bus at
this point and walked the remainder of the road in
about seven hours.
As you reach Gangotri a notice informs you that
you are now at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The trail
from this forest-fringed village to Gaumukh is
simple enough providing you have good conditions.
In fact a day’s march takes you well beyond the tree
line to the welcoming rest-house of Bhojbasa. The
next morning you can continue on to Gaumukh,
the source, which tumbles from the mouth of a
huge ice cave at the end of the Gangotri Glacier. On
one side rises the massif of the Bhagirathi peaks.

Completing the spectacular backdrop on the other are the
stupendous ice ridges falling from the summit of Shivling, the
‘Matterhorn of India’. Soaring to an elevation of 6,543 metres,
it is a peak of remarkable elegance and simplicity. Such places
are regarded as the most sacred on Earth by the Hindu faithful.
As I sat at this remarkable spot I had the feeling of eternity
being a kind of ‘continuous present’. Could this be the lesson
we hurrying, anxious Westerners might learn from India: how
to be here and now? In the Gita, Sri Krishna did not counsel
Arjuna to think about the future should he win or lose the great
battle that confronted him. Fight the fight facing him with full
concentration was the advice. In other words, when you are
doing one thing do not let your mind wander elsewhere. It
seems easy enough.
Charles Clark is a writer and musician. He is the author of Ancient
River Bending: Through India to the Source of the Ganges, published by Librario.
ISBN: 9781904440253

35

REG U L A R S  N AT U R E W R I T I NG

THE POND
If you want to witness the miracle
of this normally hidden watery
world, all you have to do is…
nothing, writes Jeremy James

f you want to look into a pond, you don’t whack it with
a stick. Don’t chuck a rock or jump in it either. Leave it
be: ponds are best left alone – they’re quiet, secluded little
places having sensitive atmospheres. But, if you must look
into one, right into one; if you have the ability to see, really to
see, prepare for an alien odyssey.
Pick a nice sunny day to visit a pond. Settle down quietly beside
it. The first thing you will notice is its calm – there appears to
be nothing going on. Your presence has already had impact. The
observer has affected the experiment. The best thing you can do
is go away and leave it be, which is why ponds are best left alone.
If you must persist, stubbornly, you’ll need to exercise patience.
The creatures that live there will have clocked you before you
arrived and they will be keeping pretty still.
On your first sitting at your pond you might think you have
come to a barren little ocean, even though it is surrounded by
alder, goat withy, ragged robin, enchanter’s nightshade, water
dropwort, kingcups, veronica, cress,
algae, flag iris, reeds, sedges, horsetails
and hart’s tongue – all threaded about
with dragonflies, damselflies, bees,
wasps, hoverflies, midges, commas,
red admirals, painted ladies and, by
night, bats.
Down in the sticky plenty of the
warm underworld beneath this
fluttering canopy, scurrying along in
the root thatch will be voles and devil’s
coach-horse beetles, iridescent blues, mayfly larvae, grasshoppers,
spiders, tadpoles and toadlets – all this and you haven’t even
looked into the water yet.
At last you peer down. The first things you see are reflections.
Reflections of the blue above, clouds, overhanging branches,
inverted birds flying across the flat face of the dark crystal you
are scrying, shuddering to every single little emanation that
reverberates across its polished skin. It is a mirror. You cannot see
through this mirror until you adjust your perspective and lean a
little closer.
Bending to the water, you are presented with a shocking
image. A battered, ghoulish face looms eerily out of the darkness,
its hollow orbs staring you straight in the eyes. With a gasp of
horror you reel back. What trick is this that you came to look
into a pool only to find yourself gazing upon yourself, haloed
like the Green Man with overhanging trees and iris leaves? Ah,
this little pond is an enigma. You study your reflection like an
alchemist peering into a still – and who should come walking
across the water but a pond skater? You marvel at the indents
his pointy little toes make upon the meniscus as he skates from
shore to shore, narrowly avoiding the fragile cobweb of the big
tiger spider crouched in the dry reed, tweaking the tripwire
that separates the innocent dancer from his silvery world and
the jaws of an arachnid eternity.
As you lean closer to the water, you can smell it: its bittersweet aroma, its moulds and green slimes, its ever-evolving state
of flux as it bubbles and digests, recycles, composts and decays,
transforming death into life amongst its duckweed. As your
eyes accustom to the gloom, something wonderful happens.
Slowly, like a veil being moved across a starlit window, this
little pool reveals her cosmic treasures.
Jigging, wriggling, swimming, gliding, floating in their

altered gravitational state are many millions of dipping, diving,
swiftly and slowly moving alien craft of sensational design,
outlandish enough to make any science-fiction monster-maker
ashamed of his art. Water boatmen, mayfly nymphs, phantom
midge larvae, dragonfly larvae and water scorpions chug and
weave through this miniature viscid galaxy. Here a newt is
suspended weightlessly like a giant spaceship in the floating
arms of its spirogyral galaxy, while deep on the swampy floor
beneath lies a carpet of twigs, acorns, beech mast and leaves
in various stages of decomposition, tapestried in bewildering
technicolour, home to water snails, sandhoppers, minnows
and millions and millions of tiny little bacteria: plankton of
the freshwater shallows, their huge numbers providing the
steadying hand of balance in this fantastic little liquid universe,
which you, like a god, have had the great, good privilege to
behold, and it steals your breath away.
Bewildered by its cohesion and symmetry, its unity and
composition, you become aware that
every single thing in this pool – from
the simplest bacterium to the foxes
that come to drink – all that inhabit
or visit it are affected by it as it is by
them. Each depends one upon the
other, upon everything in and around
it. Nothing is out of place. Every
creature, however tiny or seemingly
insignificant, has reason to be there.
As you allow your eyes to penetrate
the mysteries of this symbiotic, sliding world, you find yourself
subtly sensing that as you are watching it, it is watching you.
In the duckweed, not three feet from your head, a bright
little pair of amphibian eyes watch you. Mysteriously, like an
estuarine alligator they sink soundlessly beneath the surface
with barely a ripple. Others rise in different places and, they
too, watch you. More appear: green eyes, yellow eyes, brown
eyes, black eyes. Soon you find you are being watched not only
by them but by other eyes as well. You did not spot her at first
but now you see: there in the reed is a moorhen, on a nest.
With her sharp avian eye she has been watching you all the
time. As have the birds above your head, and who knows who
has been watching you from the depths of the pool or from the
grass in which you are lying?
They have all seen you. How many of them have you noticed?
More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows. A sense of
calm pervades. All is still. Now you spot the spoor marks of the
badger in the mud. A weasel, not three yards away, stands to
sniff the air. He drops to his feet and lopes through the grass,
a golden-brown little blur in his white tie. What a miracle he
is. What a miracle it all is. You didn’t need to whack this little
aquatic ark with a stick. All you had to do was sit there and wait
for her to reveal herself, in her own time, of her own accord.
You can lie back and sleep in the sun, in the silence of the
pool, knowing that you and she are all part of the same thing,
fashioned in different ways, but made of the same stuff, while
all the crazy little inhabitants living out their exotic, busy little
lives in her metaphorical cosmic embrace are your ancestral
grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts.

Slowly, like a veil moving
across a starlit window,
the little pool reveals her
cosmic treasures

Issue 265

Jeremy James is an author, journalist and novelist whose work is
informed by the natural world.

37

REG U L A R S  G A R D E N D E S I G N

james towillis
gwc - japan
scale 1:50
july 2010

The Resurgence Peace Garden

L

ast autumn, award-winning British garden
designer James Towillis was invited to take
part in the Gardening World Cup in Japan
where he built The Resurgence Peace Garden.
James, who took his inspiration from the Japanese
version of the creation story – where Amaterasu
Omikami is drawn back out of her cave to restore light
to the world – and who won a silver medal for the
garden, is now planning a Resurgence 45th Birthday
commemorative garden at his home in Devon.
Here, he shares some of the underlying key
concepts from the Peace Garden design:
✽ The Resurgence Peace Garden represents a
symbolic journey in search of our true nature,
beginning with the centre of the pool where we
feel exposed and disconnected from Nature.
✽ As our awareness of the need to connect with

38

Nature grows so does the realisation that if we
move mindfully, paying attention to each step
we take, we can create our own paths toward
our true nature.
✽ There is no obvious path, which makes us
pay attention to our every step; this slowness
of movement and consideration of each step
encourages us to remain in the present moment.
✽ Climbing up a little and looking back, we notice
a green shoot growing out of the black hole in
the centre of the pool. This reminds us that far
from being disconnected from Nature, she is at
the heart of our being.
To learn more about The Resurgence Peace Garden
and its designer, James Towillis, see our website
(www.resurgence.org) where we have a longer article.

March/April 2011

Far from being disconnected
from Nature, she is at the
heart of our being

The Resurgence Peace Garden

Issue 265

All images: James Towillis and Jane Tearle

39

REG U L A R S  O P I N I O N

G

Keeping Watch

enetically modified (GM) crops
have been grown
in the USA,
Canada, much of South
America, China and India for
more than 10 years now. The
large and powerful biotech
industries are doing all they
can to force all governments to
accept GM crops – and Australia,
for one, is now cracking.
However, it is Europe,
where resistance has been
strongest, that is currently receiving the brunt of this pressure.
Yes, there are areas in Spain, Portugal, Slovakia, the Czech
Republic and Romania where GM crops, mainly maize, are
grown, but the majority of Europe remains GM-free, with
the strongest resistance being led by the citizens of the UK.
(And since Caroline Spelman, the coalition government’s new
Environment Secretary, worked for a corporate lobbying group
promoting GM in her previous job, things are not looking that
much rosier with the new administration.)
Vandana Shiva, the Indian activist and Resurgence columnist, says
that the “world is watching closely how the UK is reacting to the
ever-changing pressures”. That
said, with more and more
bad press from farmers who
have been growing GM crops
worldwide, there is now more resistance to new GM varieties.
For example, in 2010 the Indian nation rose up as one and said
‘NO’ to GM aubergine.
On the surface, it simply looks a matter of time before our
countryside is littered with GM crops. Our farmers are being
overwhelmed by information telling them how yields will
increase, the use of crop sprays will fall, profits will increase and
it will all add up to being “more friendly to our environment”.
(Canadian farmers were even offered seed for free for the first
two years…) No wonder, then, that there seems to be an air
of inevitability, which, with ever fewer articles in our national
press spelling out the real facts, is intensifying. “GM will
feed the world” is the hollow line bandied about that is now
winning over more of the public.
There have recently been two trial plots of GM potato in Norfolk
(at a cost to the taxpayer of £1.7 million). One showed good
resistance to blight – the scourge of the potato – and the other didn’t.
The Sárvári Research Trust in Wales has, through conventional
plant-breeding techniques, produced six varieties of potato
with high resistance to blight. ‘Sárpo Mira’(the oldest variety)
still has strong resistance after 10 years. As a ‘bonus’, it
continues growing to the first frost, is deep-rooted, and has a
strong natural resistance to viruses and nematodes. Also, due
to the mass of foliage produced, which shades the ground,
suppressing weed growth and reducing the need for herbicides,
it is a variety that sits well with organic growers.
The Sárvári Trust receives no government funding, and when
Ministers were asked if they intended to visit, the reply was “We
have no plans to go up there”. A tasting was (apparently) carried
out on the Sárpo potato with supermarket representatives and it
was failed on ‘taste’. However, I have recently spoken with two

farmers who have grown Sárpo
potatoes for the last three
years and who report a very
enthusiastic local response.
So what about the potato
blight? As with all pests and
diseases, Nature mutates and
builds up ‘resistance’, which is
why we change the wormers
used on sheep and cattle, and
why people take different
antimalarial pills when going
to hot countries. Potato blight
is no different. The Sárvári Trust
knows this and is planning to produce more new varieties so that
growers can mix up their planting and try to stay one step ahead.
GM is pretty much a one-trick pony: modified to be resistant
to a specific herbicide, pesticide or natural stress such as drought,
high salinity or blight. On the question of GM DNA transference
to the human body, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) website
currently states that “no material was found in the bodies of
those who eat products from animals fed GM”. The FSA has now
been asked to correct this, following correspondence with the
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at Defra, Lord Henley,
who stated that “DNA sequences associated with GM crops are to
be found (in the human body)
– albeit sporadically and at
extremely low levels”. Studies
at Newcastle University, for
example, show that genes transfer to gut bacteria, and that DNA
from food is found in the blood.
Honesty and transparency about the food we buy in shops to
feed our families is a sacred right.The website of the European Food
Safety Authority (EFSA) states that the public can request access
to all information contained in applications (of GM food or feed
products). However, “EU Regulation 1829/2003 requires that
these [applications] be made publicly available, apart from certain
information that meets defined criteria for confidentiality”.
‘Commercial confidentiality’ is a phrase used to withhold
information that could otherwise put our troops at risk, which
seems fair enough; but how can it inspire us with faith when it is
used to withhold information on GM products? The data prised
from Monsanto via the German courts in 2005 by Greenpeace
on the ‘approved’ animal feed known as Mon 863 maize, which
suggested harmful effects on kidneys and levels of white blood
cells in rats, is one of many such examples.
Both David Cameron and Zac Goldsmith told me in person and
before Britain’s general election last year that the Conservatives
would insist on proper labelling as to whether our food is
from animals raised on GM feed or contains GMOs (genetically
modified organisms). Currently, though, all we have in place is
a very loose and easily circumnavigated, unregulated system.
There is currently huge public support for clear labelling of
GMOs present in our food. Supermarkets will eventually provide
this information, but only if we all take the trouble to ask them.

To know what we are eating is a
sacred right, says Hector Christie, who
fears that Europe is under increasing
pressure to accept GM crops

GM is pretty much a one-trick pony

40

Hector Christie is a GM activist and sustainable farmer. For
more information on how growing GM crops has affected the
livelihoods of US farmers watch Farmer to Farmer – clips available at
www.GMcropsFarmertofarmer.com

March/April 2011

LETTERS  REGULARS

Letters to the Editors
BALANCED IDEAL

Looking for tigers in the vale
Image: Merlyn Chesterman

THE REAL WORLD
Regarding Mukti Mitchell’s article Sweet
No-Things (Resurgence 263), telling us to
only buy the best quality is all very well,
but he should explain how those of us
who cannot work could ever afford to
buy expensive toasters and drills.
I don’t have a credit card or even
a bank account, so I can’t even take
‘advantage’ of lower internet prices, and
unlike Mukti, I don’t have relatives who
can afford to buy me such presents for
Christmas!
Given that you publish this kind of
article, as well as adverts for £415,000
eco-houses, I now realise that your
publication is aimed firmly at the middle
classes who have money to burn.
I am not at all envious – I’m very
content being ‘poor’ and making do with
Freecycle and charity shops. But I find
Resurgence’s patronising tone a little difficult
to take at the best of times. Please try
living in the real world, Mr Mitchell.
John Ashwell
by email

Many thanks for the November/
December issue (Resurgence 263) with its
emphasis on the value of craftwork. I was
glad to see the life and work of C.R. Ashbee
celebrated, but I would question Philip
Vann’s recruitment of William Morris
into the ‘Back-to-the Land’ movement.
As a businessman, Morris was a realist
who, when looking for a suitable place to
expand his workshop in the late 1870s,
rejected the idea of moving Morris
and Co. to picturesque Blockley in the
Gloucestershire countryside, and chose
instead Merton Abbey, near to London,
where the business was expanded and
flourished. Morris told the Ancoats
Brotherhood in Manchester in 1894, “I
want neither the towns to be appendages
of the country, nor the country of the
town; I want the town to be impregnated
with the beauty of the country, and the
country with the intelligence and vivid
life of the town. I want every homestead
to be clean, orderly, and tidy; a lovely
house surrounded by acres and acres
of gardens. On the other hand, I want
the town to be clean, orderly, and tidy;
in short, a garden with beautiful houses
in it.”
It is this balanced ideal that he portrays
in his Utopian romance News from Nowhere.
Peter Faulkner
Exeter

The Joy of Making
Your Craft Special issue (Resurgence 263)
filled me with joy and hope.
It is so encouraging to know that the
modern human spirit still has room to
extol the virtues of hand making; indeed,
in my opinion, the two are inextricably
linked. If we deny ourselves the innate
need to create using our hands, we are
repressing an integral part of what makes
us human, and very much to our cost.
There is a worrying trend in modern
society of apathy and abstinence,

especially amongst the young. Many
have become spectators of life rather
than participants and as a result find
themselves disconnected and struggling
to find a purpose. As parents, we no
longer allow our children to go out,
to discover the world around them.
They have replaced hands-on, direct
experiences with virtual ones and no
longer have the chance (as previous
generations did) to find discarded raw
materials such as pieces of wood or old
bicycle parts, to transform into go-carts
or wooden boats that really do work.
We need to be curious again, to
restore the human right of physical
and mental exploration to our children
and to ourselves. Making – structured
or otherwise – can help us do that and
as long as there are people, such as
yourselves, out there who realise this,
then all is not lost.
Gillian Montegrande
Cheshire

A DIFFERENT AFRICA
I enjoy reading Resurgence at the British
Library in Bangalore and I thought
Thembi Mutch’s article Learning from
Tanzania (Resurgence 263) was very good.
I have spent some time in Nigeria
working as a VSO volunteer and I have
seen for myself how communities in
the southern part of that country are
so affected by the presence of oil there.
It seems to me the modern Nigeria is
marching ahead and away from the
traditional Africa.
What we need is more karibu (as
recommended in this article) and less wabenzi
culture. We need good food, warm shelter
and caring communities.
And in this self-centred world, we
especially need one ujamaa (roughly
translates to ‘familyhood’).
Keep up the good work!
Hemanta R. Naik
Bangalore, India

We welcome letters and emails commenting on Resurgence articles. These should include your postal address. Send your letters to:
The Editors, Resurgence, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE or email: editorial@resurgence.org
Letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity.

Issue 265

41

ART S & C R A F T S  P O E T RY

Writing As Witnessing
The work of Linda France

L

inda France sees poetry as a means
of witnessing. She writes with acute
sensitivity to whatever impinges from
without or erupts from within. In one
of her poems she says she would like to be as a
marguerite flower with its Cyclops trick of not
blinking, of being wide awake and open-eyed
before all kinds of experience: “to keep trying,
failing, flowering, day and night”. Much of her
witnessing relates to the power of art and the
great beauty and diversity of the natural world.
She writes: “Writing has always been where
I am my most authentic, most fully engaged

From The Life Cycle

of the Dragonfly
I am what remains
on a leaf when the fly has flown,
when the dark cracks open.

If the sun is high,
everything wants to rise toward it.
I heard wind
make wings
of eucalyptus leaves.
What is this I had to do?
Shed skin and bone, the soul in me,
all the gold I’d buried.
I was wet
as the eye of the morning.
Through a small skylight
in the roof of my back,
wriggling my few grams
upward and unfurling,

with my imagination, dancing in and out
of pleasure and pain, coaxing laughing
language to celebrate and transform. When
I am working at my best I am thoroughly
absorbed in the world of a particular poem.
Everything else recedes. I experience waves
of adrenalin, my stomach becomes taut,
my skin incredibly sensitive, all my senses
heightened. It’s almost erotic, slightly
intoxicating, deeply satisfying…
“I’m concerned with witnessing my process,
responding to what arises, wanting to be a
conduit for the best words in the best order.”

Gulls
How a scarf shaken out
ripples, folds around itself
and whatever air it finds,
the gulls are flocking
over the Tyne.
How, as dusk falls, they know
it’s time to fly together,
knit their flickering stitches,
white against darkening sky.
After a day of solitary soaring,
suddenly they are tribe.
How all things become more
than they are
alongside another.
How driving home
to an empty house
triggers my longing
for edge and threshold,
the possibility of flight,
a scarf of shared air.

I was the same
but different, a self-portrait
in molten green, a seed set free.

42

March/April 2011

edited by Peter Abbs

Bowl
Heavy, cold, dark – what the earth
knows of itself – I sweeten with water,
watch it soften, cohere, lean into
a new smoothness, the deep courage
of form. Whose hand is coaxing,
easing clod into circle, hand
answering hand? Together we are
making a hemisphere, a map of the sky,
known and unknown caught in the lip
of what fire will teach me to call
bowl, a vessel that will crack
and be mended, crack and be mended,
always empty, even when I fill it full
of whatever light there is, shadowfall.

When a single thought recurring caught
like paper under magnified sunlight,

Tonight I will shuck off the too-tight dress
of my skin and let fly that ounce of breath
and bone I carry twined inside myself.

it didn’t take long till flames licked their lips
and devoured windowsill, curtains, chair;
the whole room blackening into one
enormous grate. The towers of books were tinder,
tumbling into clips from the end of the world;
all the words incinerated till nothing
was left of Babel but grey flakes
of lost imaginings. The stairs turned
into the scales of an orange dragon
and the chimney roared. Last to go was the bed,
its mattress resisting the familiar heat,
proud of its memory of metaphor,
its love for play. In the end, even it was powerless.
By morning all that remained were shadows,
coils of wire. This is what I came home to;
for the first time felt air open through me, pure

I’ll kiss the river’s thin meniscus –
here at the millpond – where all it asks
is that I swoop and dive; loop the tricks
of my stiletto bill, spinning sapphire
across summer air, ripe and hungry
for purging what’s already lost. I will slice
an avenue, a hide of willow. Each
secret needs water to keep it safe, clean
as larkspur, unfathomable as tears.
I want to seed my song under the bridge
and watch it drop – a dark flare of wing,
whistling from the other side of this:
where I am and what I’ve got; which, tonight –
let me flute you – is seven days of like
meeting like, no storms, a rainbow’s arc. Light.
The strike of grief. My wild turquoise, flying.

as the water that couldn’t put the fire out,
strong as the earth deep in my bones.
All the poems have been taken from Linda France’s new volume You are Her (Arc Publications, 2010).
www.peterabbs.co.uk

Issue 265

43

ART S & C R A F T S  E A RT H A RT

DIRTY ART
From soil collected on the
heights of Devon’s Dartmoor
to a verge-side Californian
clay found on Highway 101
in the USA, two earth artists
– Leah Fanning Mebane and
Cea Blyth – explain the
benefits of creating colour
from natural pigments

Glass muller

44

Photo: courtesy Leah Fanning Mebane

March/April 2011

F

or over a decade, my medium of choice was oil
painting, which uses turpentine and toxic heavymetal-laden paints. Despite my allergic reactions to
solvents and paints – as well as my growing guilt over
polluting the Earth with toxic chemicals – I carried on using it,
remaining ignorant of any other option.
When I learned it was possible to make my own paints from
clay and oil, my passion was ignited.
I realised my paintings, already inspired by the Earth in their
patterns and colours, could also now include Nature-based
pigments. The whole process then became even more aligned
with my intrinsic values.
I discovered that over the centuries – from the Egyptians and
Etruscans to the ancient Buddhists and medieval monks – earthen
pigments have been used as the primary paint. And whilst red,
orange, yellow, brown, black, white, and sometimes even green
could always be found in the ground, blues and purples were
more elusive, each culture using different techniques to produce
them. For example, the ancient Chinese ground up malachite
and azurite, whilst the Etruscans used lapis lazuli.
The basic steps I use to make my own paint are simple: I
look for primarily clay soils, avoiding sand or soil with lots of
organic matter. The places to find the best colours are along
road cuts, in quarries (which often reveal strata of several
different-coloured earths), in eroded areas, in banks of rivers
or streams, and on construction sites. After collecting a few
handfuls, I dry the soil in the sun, before grinding it into a fine
powder and mixing it with walnut oil.
The most obvious benefit of making earthen paints is
that we’re no longer poisoning the Earth or ourselves with
unnecessary chemicals and toxins. And the pigments are
free! Even better, natural earth pigments are actually superior
to synthetic paints: they are more permanent (think cave
paintings), and are not affected by sunlight, humidity,
temperature or impurities. There is no need for added fillers
or stabilisers to increase shelf life, and the colours themselves
are more intense because the light bounces off the irregular
surfaces of each particle.
Working with natural pigments has led me to a deeper
connection with our natural world. I don’t miss the ‘normal’
experience (disconnect) of buying a tube of paint that has
been shipped from another state or country and squeezing it
out without a sense of its direct relationship to my painting
process. Instead I start with a walk down a trail, creek bed or
road cut. I breathe the fresh forest air, feel both the stillness and
the movement of the branches and birds, and before long, spot
an interesting colour.
Digging with bare hands to see if it’s mostly clay, sand, or silt,
I scoop up a handful and pause to really experience its texture.
The stillness and complexity of Nature is what I try to capture
back in my studio. The organic materials marry well with the
Nature-inspired images on each canvas, and this blending of
my work and Nature’s work allows me to express my art and
passion in partnership with the Earth.
Leah Fanning Mebane
The Dreaming Tree

Issue 265

Image: Leah Fanning Mebane

45

Pigments

The earth painted on
the canvas glows with
the same intensity as it
did in the landscape
â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Cea Blyth

46

Photo: Leah Fanning Mebane

S

tep through the door of my studio and you are entering an Aladdinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cave of
earth pigments gathered from all over the world.
Stored in beautifully labelled jars reminiscent of an apothecary; silvery dust
from a glacier in New Zealand can be found next to turmeric-yellow earth
from India. Cool green clay from Budleigh Salterton contrasts vividly with a deep red
soil from Brazil. In the corner a pestle and mortar glow with pink pigment from the
Texas desert.
There is a natural affinity between the whole spectrum of earth colours, and this notion
of pigments resonating with each other is most evident in my work Dartmoor Rainbow, which
is painted with pigments collected only from within the high moor region. Starting with
soft white feldspar glinting with quartz, picked up on a track above Postbridge, it is
followed by a pinkish clay from an old arsenic mine behind Princetown. Next, sparkling
blue-grey micaceous haematite from Kelly mine, near Lustleigh, then a cool creamy clay
crumbling off root fibres by the path along the river Dart below Holne.
The warm side of the spectrum begins with a yellow clay found by the lane up to
Sherberton and spills into a stripe of soft warm apricot ochre from the track up to the
moor from Michelcombe. Alongside that there is a band of reddish tone from the old
Gobbet tin mine and, finally, inky black peat gathered from the path up to Bellever Tor.

March/April 2011

Dartmoor Rainbow 2004

Painting: Cea Blyth

I first painted with earth pigments as a teenager, having been inspired by cave paintings in
France, and I returned again to this medium whilst collaborating with an eco-fashion design
company in London. I too had become very sensitive to chemical paints, so it made sense to use
natural materials that created no fumes or pollution.
I remain in awe of the intensity and strength of earth pigments â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a whole palette of
colours beneath your feet â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and when painting, I like to apply the pigments in layers until
the earth I have painted glows with the same intensity as it did in the landscape.
Currently I am working on a new body of work, turning my pigment collection into small
shapes and abstract sculptures that you can hold in the palm of your hand. I mix the pigments
with hemp straw and animal hair to add both strength and texture. Touching them is a fun,
tactile experience and a way to really engage with the pigments of the earth.
Cea Blyth
Working with earth pigments has inspired Cea Blyth to become part of the Slow Art movement
(see www.theworldinstituteofslowness.com). To see more of her work visit www.c-blyth.com
Leah Fanning Mebane lives in Southern Oregon, USA and exhibits her abstract and portraiture work in
galleries throughout the United States. For more information visit www.fanningart.com

Issue 265

47

ART S & C R A F T S  S I R I U S C O LOUR SYSTEM

Cosmic Colours
Painter and paint-maker Barbara Diethelm
shares her very personal discovery of the deeper
meanings of colour

C

olour has been an
integral part of my life
ever since childhood. In
1963, shortly after I was
born, my father founded his own
company and started to manufacture
artist paints, pioneering water-based
artist colours in continental Europe.
Lascaux was a family company; my
parents had very little means but lots of
enthusiasm. Like an alchemist, in the
depths of the cellar of our home, my
father mixed ingredients and stirred
them in large pots, turning them into
beautiful and luminous colours. I
remember the joy of helping to label
the aluminium tubes and carefully
putting them in a cardboard box.
As a child I painted and drew a
lot. My closest friend was my cat,
so naturally I painted her quite
often. The drawings and paintings I
made at school were ‘pale and plain’
compared to the more expressive
ones I made at home. This was
because the watercolours we used at
school were of inferior quality; and
so I understood that the quality of
paints is crucial for the facilitating of
expression. I also gained a sensibility
for colour and an appreciation for the
quality of material.
Every so often my father took me on
his visits to a painter’s studio, which
I found inspiring – a rich world of
senses: colours, imagery, paintings,
books and music. Raised in a workingclass family, my father was a craftsman
– a house and decoration painter –
until his artist friends motivated him
to develop and produce artist colours.
In this way he eventually came to
painting and drawing.
When I was 20 I accepted the
invitation of an art restorer to work
as a practical trainee with her for four

48

months, and I travelled to the USA.
While I was there I decided to enter art
school. My father wasn’t very keen on
this, knowing how hard the life of an
artist can be, but I listened to my inner
voice and chose to follow this path.
In one my first art-school classes,
the teacher asked us to draw the
energies of the chair – “which is what
the chair is”, he said, prompting us
to read the book The Tao of Physics
by Fritjof Capra. The book was a
revelation to me: there it was, the
bridging and the interconnectedness
of things, which confirmed all my
own beliefs and experiences.
The interdisciplinary approach
of the art school I attended in San
Antonio, Texas was inspiring and
invigorating. It was a quantum leap
from the fragmented education system
I had experienced in Swiss high
school. In art classes the focus was
on process and dialogue: the teachers
facilitated passionate discussions about
modern physics, Jungian psychology,
literature and philosophy, and their
relation to art. We learned dialectic
debate as well as observation. I became
immersed in the landscape of the
south-west of the US and in the history
of the Indigenous peoples, the North
American Indians. Their holistic view
of life, their iconography and their
spirituality had a great impact on me.
In art school I realised that my path
should not be dictated or directed
by the laws of the art world (i.e. the
market). I wanted to follow my own
rhythms, obliged only to my own
inner voice. I expanded my studies to
the humanities and social sciences,
including studies in management,
and eventually I decided not only to
join my father in the company but,
after his death, to continue it.

March/April 2011

What I initially perceived to be two
separate professions – painting, and
heading a company manufacturing
artist paints – have in the past few
years become organically interwoven
with colour and my interest in its
holistic properties.
For me painting is a way of
thinking; art is about relationships,
revealing interrelations. Art has the
power to sensitise perception, and
a central function of art has always
been to convey spiritual values.
Continuing my father’s credo to
produce high-quality material for
professional artists and paint users,
I felt the need to include the more
subtle levels; to instil the spiritual
dimension into this world of
business. Art and business can and
should complement one another.
Art is one of the few areas that
does not orient itself to rational
scientific thinking. In art, ‘meaning’
is considered, and interrelated and
intuitive thinking is explored.
When I returned from the US,
where I had lived for eight years, I
met the painter Werner Schmidt,
who later became my husband. This
relationship was a founding pillar of
my rainbow bridge. Shaped by our
love – for each another and also for
the sacred and beauty in art and in
everyday life – it laid the foundation
for our artistic and spiritual growth
as well as creating a life of ‘artful
living’ together. Our hearts’ desire to
see human, animal, Nature and the
cosmos in balance again led to the
setting up of the Lascaux Foundation.
What has become my major
concern in painting over the years has
become the pattern underlying my
life. Whether as artist, entrepreneur
or gardener my aim is to connect
the mental and spiritual with the
material and practical. My work is
the alchemy of colours: as a paint
manufacturer I am in daily dialogue
with the material properties of colour
and their aesthetic aspects, and also
their invisible dimension, with
which art is ultimately concerned.
I believe that matter, be it our
bodies or the materials we use
to create art, is a vessel for the
spiritual. To receive and integrate
the spiritual a consciousness has to
develop. Craftsmanship alone is not

enough. The disposition for art, for
the visionary, for the truly creative
is a mental-spiritual one. Simplicity,
humility, endurance and patience are
needed to develop that. And what
seems effortless is the harvest of long
and arduous work.
Light is the mother of all colours.
From the unity of light the colours
unfold in their diversity. This socalled visible spectrum is small
compared to the entire spectrum of
rays. It is perceived only when light
encounters matter: a body, a star,
a planet or a prism. Through this
breaking of the light, colours appear,
in their different wavelengths, from
blue-violet to red-magenta. Colours
are therefore simply waves of energy
transmitting information.
I have been privileged to be able
to paint with wonderful paints
from early on and have always been
intrigued by the mixing and blending
of colours, but the limitation of
systems based upon the intermixing
of the traditional three primary
colours taught from primary to art
school everywhere always bothered
me because it leads to very limited and
imprecise results. What is explained in
theory doesn’t work in practice. For
instance, mixing the primaries should
yield black, yet it produces brown.
This led me to ask why there
can’t be a simple and clear colourmixing system that transcends these
limitations and bridges the concerns
of art and science.
So in 1995 I began to research
the development of an expanded
colour system based on five primary
colours, which works as a more
precise mixing system. The purity
of the colours and their balanced
frequencies allow an effortless means
of mixing an unlimited range of
harmonious, lively and differentiated
nuances. The new system, which I
named Sirius Primary System (Sirius
being the brightest star in the winter),
demonstrates that every material
colour inherits the metaphysical
dimension of its cosmic origin.
Barbara Diethelm (www.barbaradiethelm.
com) will lead a workshop on
Cosmic Colours at the Tagore Festival
in May. For further information visit
www.tagorefestival.com
Epithets of Sekhmet

Issue 265

Images: Barbara Diethelm

49

ART S & C R A F T S  L A N G UAG E OF THE SOUL

The Age of

Beauty
Novelist Linda Proud celebrates
the life of Botticelli, whom she
describes as a “painter of Soul”

M

ention Love or Beauty, and often the
images that spring to mind are those
of Sandro Botticelli’s great trinity of
Venus paintings: Primavera, The Birth of
Venus, Venus and Mars. That serene and lovely face of
Venus has become the very icon of the Florentine
Renaissance.
It is astonishing that some of the greatest artistic
talents of all time were born in the same city in the
same century. At the beginning of the period we
have Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello and Ghiberti;
at the end, Leonardo and Michelangelo; and in the
lull between these two great ages of giants came Fra
Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli.
These were not men of virtù – seeking excellence,
seeking always to be bigger, better, more innovative,
more shocking and controversial than their
predecessors or their rivals. These were men in
an oxbow lake, away from the flowing river, on a
quiet water of deep reflection. Painters of Love and
Beauty: the very men preferred by the Medici as
their interests grew increasingly philosophical.
Since the Great Council of 1439, in which the
Greek and Latin Churches had met in Florence in
an attempt to heal the schism of East and West,
Cosimo de’ Medici had harboured the ambition to

refound the Platonic Academy, but he did not do so until 1464.
Meanwhile he had raised and educated the son of his physician
to the task of translating the Dialogues of Plato from Greek into
Latin; Marsilio Ficino gave his life to the work, and translated
every major text in the Western tradition: Hermes Trismegistus,
the Neoplatonists, Plotinus. Through Ficino and the Academy,
the great Platonic triad of Truth-Beauty-Goodness entered,
or re-entered, Christendom (its previous arrival in the 12th
century had given rise to the Gothic cathedrals).
In the 1460s, the young Botticelli was training under Lippi,
a Carmelite who was living with a runaway nun. Cosimo,
however, recognised in this unholy friar a divine quality, which

March/April 2011

he called ‘genius’, and commissioned several works
from him, some to be done in situ in the Palazzo
Medici. As Lippi’s apprentice, Botticelli would
have met and perhaps befriended a boy four years
his junior: Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo. Perhaps
one inspired the other; perhaps they arrived at it
individually; but they shared a life-long love affair
with the poetry of Dante.
As Ficino was tutor to the young Lorenzo de’
Medici, Botticelli would have been familiar with
the philosopher; he was obviously a sponge to his
teachings. Also in the Medici household was the
poet Angelo Poliziano. Between them Ficino and
Poliziano informed Botticelli’s ‘pagan’ imagery.
When in the 1480s the Medici
and their kin were commissioning
paintings for domestic settings –
paintings for the soul rather than
the spirit – they turned to the
painter who understood what Ficino was talking
about when he spoke of “the planets within”; who,
listening to Poliziano reciting his vernacular poetry
about Venus, closed his eyes and breathed in images.
To breathe in – inspiration. Botticelli breathed in
the ideas and imagery of the poets and philosophers
and breathed them out onto panels – expiration.
Owen Barfield – one of the Inklings – had a phrase
for an artist or author who partakes of the divine
spark: “mythopoeic sub-creator”. Man as instrument
of the Divine. With Botticelli’s mythic paintings, we
are at that level.
Despite Botticelli’s long and productive life
painting devotional panels and altarpieces, these
days his name is linked almost exclusively to his soul
images, images that seem to defy explanation. Since
the dawn of art history, no one has succeeded in
pinning out the Primavera like a butterfly and naming
all its parts. Something always slips, sidesteps,
eludes us: some glimpsing, winking nymph just out
of sight behind the oleanders. For what Botticelli
painted was symbol or myth, not allegory. Such
images work on the viewer’s soul, and the Primavera
was designed, almost as a magical operation, to
open hearts. Whether the central figure is Venus, or
the Virgin Mary, or – as has recently been proposed
– Luna is a matter for the viewer to decide. Botticelli
isn’t going to tell you. This art is not prescriptive.
It is an evocation of the Otherworld of the Soul,
using wonderfully detailed and realistic elements
from this world (note the flowers and meadow
plants, not to mention the toenails). While we may
have no idea what the Primavera is about, it gives us a
profound experience of Beauty.
It must have been astonishing for Botticelli to make
up images out of his own imagination, inspired by
readings from classical and Neoplatonic texts. He
was perhaps one of the first artists to experience
creative freedom, and he did not shrink from it.
The model he used for his archetypal female figure
was Simonetta Vespucci, a young noblewoman who

lived in his district of Ognissanti.
His soul paintings all occur within a very short
period – less than 10 years. It is the golden age of
Lorenzo the Magnificent, the springtime of the
Renaissance, a time of jousts, pageants and great
processions of the Magi. Drums, lutes and showers
of roses. It is the Age of Beauty. An age that was to be
destroyed by the fundamentalist preacher Savonarola.
In some respects, Savonarola brought morality
back into Florentine life and behaviour, but he
never understood the Platonists and he had a deep
distrust of beauty. In his rise to civic power, he
ousted the Medici; Beauty fled with them into
exile. As the world grew dark and increasingly

It is an evocation of the Otherworld of the Soul

Issue 265

disturbed, Botticelli turned to a project that was
to occupy him until his death – the illustration
of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Working in miniature,
he again used details of this world as ingredients
for his images of the next, whether it be hell,
purgatory or paradise.
Was Botticelli a follower of Savonarola? He
certainly seems to have believed in Savonarola’s
prophecies and to have had hope in his message of
a renewed Church, but he was not a zealot. Instead
he was a man trying to keep an open mind whilst
retreating more and more into a deeply spiritual
world of his own.
In his last paintings, such as The Tragedy of Lucretia, the
architecture takes over, as if to give some stability to
a life that, in the millennial ‘one and a half time’ of
1500, was fast becoming the apocalypse Savonarola
had prophesied. Botticelli speaks cryptically of these
‘woes’ in a text he wrote in Greek and hid beneath
the frame of The Mystic Nativity.
Where his heart truly lay, however, is revealed in
one of the very few facts we have of his life. When
he died in May 1510, he was buried at his own
request in the church of Ognissanti, at the foot of
Simonetta Vespucci.
Botticelli was the first painter of Soul, the first
to give her a face and a form, and perhaps that is
why we love him so much today. Both he and Ficino
were almost forgotten in the succeeding centuries.
Their revival coincides with the philosophical and
psychological renaissance of our own age.
That’s what happens with ‘mythopoeic subcreation’. When man has faith in his own genius,
when he is inspired by his own soul, when he steps
aside from the rivalries of fashion, his art touches
the eternal.
Linda Proud is the author of three novels set in the
Florentine Renaissance known collectively as The
Botticelli Trilogy. A fourth, about Fra Filippo Lippi, is to
be published in spring 2011. www.godstowpress.co.uk

51

ART S & C R A F T S  E X H I B I T I O N: THE ROMANTICS REHANG

The Art of Liberation
Far from being vapid ‘Nature worship’, the
Romantics’ engagement with Nature was both
passionately emotional and intellectually, even
scientifically, incisive, writes Harry Eyres

‘

Romantic’ has become almost a term of abuse.
Listening to the Radio 4 programme Start the Week a
little while ago I heard the presenter Andrew Marr say
“This programme has an anti-Wordsworth policy”,
referring to the greatest English Romantic poet. No doubt
he meant it partly as a joke, and the poet Craig Raine, also
on the show, had the presence of mind to cry “Shame on
you!” but the implications were spelled out by another
contributor, the writer and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist:
“Nowadays we think of Romantic as signifying something
a bit woolly or self-indulgent”.

The Romantics saw a deep connection
between humans and Nature
In this context the rehang of the Romantic artists in the
Clore Gallery at Tate Britain, home to the Turner Bequest,
takes on special relevance, even urgency. The rehang
has been widely criticised – perhaps because it dared
to tamper with one of the sacred spaces of British art;
one critic called it “an infuriating shambles”. I felt quite
the opposite: invigorated and stimulated to reconsider
artists who might on one level seem familiar (Turner,
Constable) but who, put into fresh juxtapositions and
seen with undulled eyes, still have the power to challenge
mechanical ways of thinking and even inspire us to a
renewed vision of what it is to be human and how to be
at home in the cosmos. How desperately we need that.
On first inspection the presentation of the Romantics
may be disconcerting and not obviously coherent. What
do the kitschy soft-porn fantasies of Henry Fuseli have
in common with Constable cloud-studies? What do
Blake’s writhing figures, looking back to Michelangelo
and forward to Munch, have in common with anything?
But Romanticism was never a single coherent movement:
more an explosion of talent and vision.
On the other hand, certain powerful and recurring
themes emerge. The Romantics were fundamentally
concerned with freedom and energy. You can trace the

52

concern with freedom, or liberation, back to Rousseau’s
clarion call from chapter 1 of The Social Contract, “Man is
born free and is everywhere in chains”, and connect it with
the revolutionary energy that brought forth the shaping
event of the age, the French Revolution. But the Romantic
concern with freedom goes deeper than ‘regime change’.
The visionary early Romantic poet and artist William
Blake interpreted Rousseau’s statement at many different
levels. One of the most fascinating rooms in the rehang
presents the group of tiny hand-coloured etchings recently
discovered and bought by Tate Britain in January 2010.
They don’t seem to be about freedom at all, but more
about mental agony, imprisonment, slavery and torture;
one is entitled Who Shall Set the Prisoners Free? Blake realised
that our “mind-forged manacles” are even stronger and
tougher to break out of than the physical handcuffs of
an authoritarian regime. In the name of ‘economy’ or
‘progress’ we continue to subject parts of ourselves, and
others, and Nature to deathly torture and exploitation.
The dark side of Romanticism is not just about
subjective feelings of gloom and doom, or thwarted love.
Romanticism arose, in part, as a great movement of protest
against the tyrannical reign of a certain kind of rationality
whose hidden, or not-so-hidden, costs continue to rise
while the benefits seem more and more questionable.
The positive side of Romanticism is about energy.
“Energy”, said Blake, “is Eternal Delight”. The Romantics
saw a connection between the deep human energies – love,
desire, sexuality, creativity, mourning and melancholia
(the black holes of human energy) – and the energies of
Nature, of light, water, wind, seasons, the sea, the clouds.
Far from being vapid ‘Nature worship’, the Romantics’
engagement with Nature was both passionately emotional
and intellectually, even scientifically, incisive. Nature for
earlier artists was almost always a backdrop to human
events. The Romantics looked more closely at it and more
deeply into it than any previous artists in history, with the
possible exception of Leonardo and Dürer. Rubens and
Rembrandt had done marvellous studies of human faces,
but no one had studied clouds the way Constable did, out

March/April 2011

Norham Castle, Sunrise, circa 1845, by Joseph Mallord William Turner

in the open, in all weathers, noting not what a cloud
‘should’ look like, but how it actually behaved.
Turner’s view of Nature was rather different from
that of his great rival and contemporary Constable,
who loved the broad-leafed greenness and loamy
brownness of his native Suffolk countryside. Turner
hated English green. This extraordinary, restless
artist looked for inspiration as much to Italy – to the
classical landscape of the bay of Naples, to the lightand water-filled cityscape of Venice – as to English
hills and lakes.
What Turner saw, which no one had seen before,
and which would open the way to the French
Impressionists, was the interpenetration of Nature
and the human world. It is not just that the natural
world is shot through with human traces and
influences, but that we are forces of Nature. The
shimmering domes and sinuous gondolas of Venice
seem to be as much part of the ‘landscape’ as the
water and the clouds. At the same time, the bright
and bushy-tailed young man we see looking out at
us with disconcerting directness from Turner’s early
self-portrait has a distinctly feral quality.
Turner’s magnificent painting The Bay of Baiae, with
Apollo and the Sibyl looks at first sight quite like a
Claude Lorraine, but the closer you look, the odder
it gets. The glowing light on the vegetation climbing

Issue 265

Image: Tate Images

the hills, the strange details, a rabbit, a snake, even
the intensity of the blue sky seem almost surreal. The
painting tells the story of the Cumaean Sibyl, who
asked the god Apollo for unlimited life. She forgot
to ask for eternal youth. Human creations, the traces
of ancient civilisations, are doomed to decay; Nature
alone has infinite powers of regeneration.
Science continues to provide strengthening
evidence that our relationship with Nature has
become dangerously unbalanced. But unlike the
Romantics we seem to be proceeding ever further into
what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called
“an absolute artificialism”, choosing to cut ourselves,
especially our children, off from direct contact with
Nature, preferring the flickering shadow-world
of virtual reality. At the same time an increasingly
authoritarian form of capitalism, with governments
willing to sacrifice basic public goods to apparently
all-powerful financiers, is given the hollow name of
freedom. The Romantics, you can be sure, would not
have sat back and let the followers of Procrustes hack
off the limbs of humanity and Nature to satisfy their
abstract scheme of things.
Tate Britain’s Romantics Rehang runs until the end of July
2011. Harry Eyres writes a weekly column in the Financial
Times and is Editor-at-large of Resurgence.

he cover picture of Truda Lane’s
enchanting book entices us into
the world within. Between two
lines of trees, an animal (a dog? a wolf? –
the caption tells us it is a ‘Wolfish Dog’)
sniffs tenderly at a sitting cat. The image
is repeated in a floating circle. A girl in
cloak and scarf clutches a tree trunk for
support, for the wind is blowing fiercely
through the branches. At her feet, birds
peck the ground for food. Flakes of
snow are falling, and there are stars in
the sky. The dog, the caption continues,
transformed an everyday landscape into
something remarkable.
And here is one clue to the particular
magic of these drawings. The world they
depict is indeed everyday, and firmly
rooted in reality. The buffeted trees, for
all their rhythmic movement, are solid
objects, the history of their growth
delineated in their knobbly twisted
trunks. Whenever buildings appear, they
are not only carefully observed: they
are real structures, with their lintels,
keystones and cornerstones.
Truda Lane, in her Introduction,
describes structure as the source of life,
dynamic energy and movement, and
of course she means the structure of
the whole drawing. She defines a good
drawing as one that you can set bones
from, and within this structure little bits
of magic are occurring.
A Derbyshire farmhouse is lit up by a
glimpse of the fiery sun. “As we stopped
to buy eggs,” the artist explains, “the
woman of the house excitedly announced
that the sun was about to appear round

54

the hill for a brief few minutes, the only
time during the day it could be seen”. At
the top of the steps against a Devon stone
barn, a boy is waving a sparkler around,
the brightly coloured sparks echoing the
pale stars in the night sky above. “There
is still some magic left”, the title informs
us, and it is this magic that informs these
drawings and watercolours.
The subject matter can be classical myth
or fairytale, small observation or works of
literature. One wonderful watercolour
is inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday:
“Lady, three white leopards sat under a
juniper tree | In the cool of the day…”
The first stars of the evening are in the sky,
and a skull and bones lie nearby. In the
poem, the bones sing: “We are glad to be
scattered, we did little good to each other.”
In the watercolour, they say, “Sancta Maria
ora pro nobis” – Blessed Mary, pray for us.
We encounter a Creation Myth. We
meet Aengus, the Celtic God of Youth,
sitting under a tree with his four
birds round his head, and a leopard
and butterflies nearby. A Greek boy,
Melampus, buries a dead serpent, and
her children lick his ears to reward him
with the gift of understanding animal
speech. And the winter sun is buried
under the earth, a North American myth.
Yet the domestic is never far away – a
decorated soup tureen, a bowl of fruit,
a vegetable garden, a cat curled up on a
cushion.
For all the delicacy of line, these
pictures are full of energy and
movement. The trees, which inhabit
many of them, have the vigour of their

Image: Truda Lane

growth enshrined in their trunks, and
their branches are blown by the wind,
as the rushing deer run through them.
“Stones have been known to move, and
trees to speak,” said Macbeth, and these
trees speak to us. Indeed, the title of one
of the sections is Speaking Trees.
In his perceptive Foreword, John Moat
places Truda Lane amongst those artists
– many of them women – “who bring
to their work a vision so innately their
own…that we tend to view them as apart
from their time, impossible to categorise,
and so perhaps eccentric”. He cites
women novelists, poets and painters Emily
Dickinson, Stevie Smith, Jean Rhys, Ivy
Compton-Burnett, Gwen John, Winifred
Nicholson, Mary Newcomb; but he could
have included at least one man, David
Jones, also quite out of the mainstream
– a writer and artist who shared similar
sources with this artist: myth, fairy tale,
literature and the natural world.
This book will be a revelation to most
of those who come across it. It has been
beautifully designed by Simon Wilby, and
as the recent exhibition of Renaissance
drawings in the British Museum showed,
drawing is the most intimate of arts, where
you feel closest to the artists themselves.
These drawings and watercolours speak
very directly of the inner life of Truda
Lane. They are indeed lifelines, which tell
a story of an English landscape, and a very
English imagination.
Harland Walshaw is an architectural
photographer. To order your copy see page 66
or go to www.resurgence.org/shop

welve essayists – amongst them
a poet, novelists, art historians
and Nature writers – have
created here an intricately rich portrait
of the Cornish-based land and seascape
painter Kurt Jackson (b. 1961). The
son of two abstract painters, Jackson
grew up surrounded by paintings. He
tells Howard Jacobson that, as a boy, he
“came home from school, got into rough
clothes and went looking in hedgerows,
turning over stones, looking at birds”.
After studying zoology at Oxford
University, he and fellow zoology student
Caroline trekked around Africa for a year,
before settling, marrying and having
children in Cornwall. Without any formal
art education, Jackson started painting
there with the kind of authentic passionate
focus he has sustained ever since.
Mike Tooby writes: “Jackson came to
live in Cornwall in 1984. He spent five
years in the place he first chose, Boscastle
in North Cornwall, before moving to
Penwith, also loosely referred to as West
Cornwall. By settling above Botallack,
he lives a long way from [the artistic
communities of] St Ives and Newlyn. The
central points of his locality are St Just and
[a] straggle of former mining villages.”
John Russell Taylor points out that
Jackson is a traditional painter in the
sense that “you cannot see any of his
paintings…without being aware of a
great underlying body of tradition” that
includes, for example, “Turner’s later,
more abstracted works” and “Constable’s
more private watercolour sketches”.
The wildly sensitive, spontaneous

Issue 265

mark-making that pervades Jackson’s art,
while inseparable from a real, sensuous
observation of Nature, has affinities
with paintings by American Abstract
Expressionists, the intuitive expressionism
of Joan Eardley’s 1950s’ and early 1960s’
Scottish seascapes and landscapes, and
works by the contemporary German
painter Anselm Kiefer.
For example, Kiefer has extensively
incorporated pieces of glass, straw,
wood and plants into landscapes charged
with dark historical resonances. Jackson
started out melding sand and small
pebbles into the paint surface but now
opts for radically exploratory effects.
Mark Cocker describes him incising
“with a razor blade a bruised grey sky he
has just laid on the paper”, and how “at
one point…he uses all the digits from
both hands and it looks as if he is playing
the piano in his own wet paint”.
Frequently, words are scrawled onto
the paint – such as “the sun breaks
through and the kittiwakes start to
scream”. The overall result is that the
viewer is absorbed, with an awestruck
force, in Nature’s infinitely subtle and
diverse atmospheres and rhythms.
Jackson draws and sketches prolifically
en plein air, making paintings later on in
the studio based on diverse, accumulated
studies. He is a real visionary explorer;
canoeing, wading and swimming in many
rivers, and traversing the Penwith moors
with their megalithic burial mounds and
stone circles. He is enmeshed in English
woodland thickets, scorched in ancient
Greek olive groves. Jacobson writes: “The

Image: courtesy Lund Humphries

amazing thing to me is that out of his
weather-beaten artisanal bulk should come
work of such exquisite sensuousness.”
Richard Mabey notes: “What is impressive
is his painterly translation of the ecology of
wild places.”
Terre d’Oliviers, big buzzy flies and hot happy
grasshoppers within the shade of this olive tree is
the informally inscribed title of a 2003
painting. Bel Mooney writes: “the olive
groves of Kardamili represent an ancient
transaction between humans, culture and
the land. There has been a settlement in
this region since the…time of Homer.”
Jackson’s black olive trunks and branches
are numinous, monumental presences,
yet they seem to dance like some archaic,
stalwart calligraphy across the earth
shimmering pink and gold with parched
grasses.
Jackson’s painting of the A3071, dusk.
Car lights from/into St Just, last night of the
Millennium, reveals a both matter-offact and apocalyptic journey. It shows
a patch of egg-yolk brilliancy glowing
on the grey tarmac, itself glistening a
delicious pink colour, partly reflected
from an intense sunset red permeating
the roadside. Beyond are stretches of
interminable blackness. The Millennium
reference is both starkly descriptive (as
in a neat diary entry) but also, subtly,
symbolically evocative of the bright hopes
and aspirations, bloody possibilities and
broodingly dark mystery evident at the
end of one great historical era, and the
beginning of a fresh one.
Philip Vann is an arts writer.

55

REV I E W S

A STELLAR LIFE
Chellis Glendinning is inspired by one of
America’s greatest peace activists
On Gandhi’s Path: Bob Swann’s Work for Peace and
Community Economics
Stephanie Mills
New Society Publishers, 2010
ISBN: 9780865716155

I

n the wild and eager 1960s a San Francisco radio announcer named
Scoop Nisker ended each newscast with “If you don’t like the news…
go out and make some of your own!”
That is exactly what the US social innovator Bob Swann did – except that
his handmade news sprang from the generation that paved the way for the
activists of the sixties, just as we hearty souls laid some good ground for
today’s youthful movers and shakers.
Swann was a nonviolent war resister. He was a civil rights activist, an
agrarian decentralist, and a pioneer of intentional communities, local
currencies, micro-lending, natural architecture and land trusts. And along
with fellow just-economics thinker Susan Witt, he co-founded the US-based
E.F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
On Gandhi’s Path provides the long view of this stellar life, penned by
ecologist Stephanie Mills as fluidly as a breeze through one of her subject’s
beloved New England woodlands.
Robert Swann was born just as World War I was winding down, in
1918. He spent his formative years in a neighbourhood/forest matrix
in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The tightly knit sense of community and
closeness to Nature on Sycamore Street laid the basis for a lifetime of
ideas and passions. But the 1920s were also times of excessive corporate
amassment of capital, and this fact – so blatant in industrialising Cleveland,
with its Rockefeller and Carnegie mansions on Millionaires’ Row, and
its exclusive golf course in Cleveland Heights – also had its impact on
Swann’s growing psyche.
Of particular interest in Mills’ quest to capture the vitality of the man
who came from such a historical environment is the web of fellow
newsmakers whose work interfaced with and enriched Swann’s own, and
this piece of social-change-movement geography, beginning in the 1940s,
is worth the price of the book.
African-American war resister Bayard Rustin. Consummate decentralists
E.F. Schumacher and Leopold Kohr. Organic homesteaders Helen and
Scott Nearing. Radical resister Dave Dellinger. Organiser Marj Shaffer. Social
philosopher Arthur Morgan. Regionalist Ralph Borsodi. Civil rights activists
Juanita and Wally Nelson. Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day. Writer Barbara
Deming. MANAS editor Henry Geiger. Folk singer Pete Seeger.They were all there,
each adding his or her own ingenuity to the building of a viable movement for
peace and justice.
And, of course, not as an in-the-flesh colleague but as a far-off light beaming
first from South Africa and later from India, there was Mahatma Gandhi –

56

Bob Swann
Photo: Clemens Kalischer

whose belief in satyagraha, or respectful nonviolent
noncompliance with injustice, inspired Swann to
engage in “open resistance” to World War II.
What followed was a two-year prison sentence,
highlighted by conscientious-objector organising
against the institutional racism and absurd
regimentation that reigned – and eight months of
punishment by solitary confinement.
In January 2003, Bob Swann’s spirit passed from
the world he worked to ease towards economic
justice and peace. At a commemoration in
Massachusetts at his E.F. Schumacher Society, the late
religious philosopher Thomas Berry commented of
Swann: “He was among the noblest persons I have
ever known”.
On Gandhi’s Path captures Swann’s person in such
a straightforward way that it inspires us – in these
disillusioning times of surreal war-making, downand-dirty poverty, total encasement by technology,
and chaotic breakdown – with exactly what we
need: to stay the path.
And make our own news.
Like Bob Swann, Chellis Glendinning grew up in
Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Author of five books, including
the award-winning Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into
Empire and the Global Economy, she now lives in Bolivia.
www.chellisglendinning.org

Sophie Poklewski Koziell meets a
philosophical mechanic
The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office
Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good
Matthew Crawford
Viking, 2010
ISBN: 9780670918744

H

ere lies a serious discourse on the
ways in which we work. Crudely
summed up, it is a cross between
Small is Beautiful and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance, written for the 21st century by
a mechanic-philosopher.
Matthew Crawford starts by observing
how little we make and mend, and how
much we buy. Hand in hand with this
trend is the decline of ‘industrial arts’
training in schools, which used to teach
the basics of the manual trades.
Crawford proceeds to investigate
fundamental questions about the nature
of work, and how and why it is changing.
Is our increasing manual disengagement
good for us? Does our work lead us
down the path of passive consumerism?
And how are our characters shaped by
our work?
This is not an idealistic call to go back
to a bygone craft era. No: this book is
grounded in reality. It derives its strength
from its author, a motorbike mechanic
with an unusual background. Crawford
spent his formative years in a commune,
skiving school and hanging around with
electricians. He pursued a doctorate in
political philosophy, and then after a brief
spell as a disillusioned director of a think
tank in Washington, he ran back into
the arms of his first love – motorbikes –
and started a repair shop. Here is a man
who, because of his enquiring mind and
quirky background, is not afraid to think
outside the box.
Two strands of writing style run
through the book. The first is the voice of
the academic philosopher. Reading these

Issue 265

parts calls for focus, but reaps rewards.The
other style is that of the ‘gearhead’ rebel.
This is Crawford’s true voice. Through
these passages the author freewheels
through his life’s experiences as a
mechanic, stripping down a 1975 Honda
CB360 or building speed into his VW
Bug. The book is unique because there are
many philosophical mechanics, but very
few philosophers who are mechanics.
The section on the history of the
‘blue collar’/’white collar’ divide is
fascinating. The social status attached to
each, and how ‘blue collar’ work started
to be degraded with the introduction of
scientific management. How work that
was once cognitively rich and required
significant skill and experience, such as
being a wheelwright, became fragmented
and simplified when introduced into a
factory environment.
Now, it seems, we have become used to
this ‘dumbed-down’ version of manual
labour, and have so little awareness of
what we’re missing out on that we don’t
bother to protest. Yet when Henry Ford
started his first car factories, he struggled
to keep workers because they all walked
out in disgust with the boredom of the
work! These men had been hired from
bicycle shops and carriage makers, where
they had been involved in complex and
rewarding manual work. Interestingly,
to compensate for the tedium of Ford
factory work, Ford had to raise wages to
keep workers.
The clean, serene, coffee-machine
world of the ‘white collar’ worker is
not immune either. The book charts the

way in which management has broken
down previously engaging and complex
mental tasks into work ‘processes’
that can be better ‘managed’. Work is
becoming formulaic and intellectually
empty. This has slowly led to a profound
disconnection between most people’s
work life and leisure life. They are
generally unfulfilled at work and
tolerate boredom in return for financial
compensation, and through leisure they
accumulate psychic nourishment. We
have become so habituated to this set-up
that we rarely question it.
Crawford has no political agenda.
He just offers his thoughts from the
experience of his own life’s journey. His
aim is not to spawn a new generation of
mechanics, but to question the way we
view and treat work. Obviously manual
work is not for everyone, but it has been
so ‘downgraded’ that many people are
encouraged to sit behind computers,
when they would be more fulfilled
making, building and fixing things.
Crawford champions manual competence, the experience it provides, and
its intellectual and social rewards. He
seeks to reverse the image that educators
and management consultants alike
seem to paint of the manual trades as
“cramped and paltry: the plumber with
his butt crack, peering under a sink”.
And, he doesn’t fail to point out, “that
filthy plumber might be charging eighty
dollars an hour”.
Sophie Poklewski Koziell is an Associate
Editor of Resurgence.

57

REV I E W S

GREEN THE WORLD
John Clarke reviews a book of great
inspiration and hope

ome readers may remember The
Greening of America by Charles Reich,
published 40 years ago, which
spoke of the coming transformation in
consciousness, nonviolent revolution to
confront corruption, poverty, environmental destruction, powerlessness, dehumanisation of work, our loss of
community and loss of the spiritual.
Sound familiar? Give or take a few
details, are we not facing similar crises
today? There is still much talk of the need
for a new worldview, of a new green
consciousness; and an acute awareness
that we are in an advanced state of crisis
– environmental, social, spiritual. So,
what happened to the revolution that
Reich and others promised?
GreenSpirit is a bold attempt to revisit
these issues from a contemporary
standpoint, with a strong emphasis on
the need for a spiritual approach, and to
deeply question our cultural assumptions.
The editor has brought together a variety
of contributors from a wide range of
experiences, disciplines and traditions.
The book, with its 30 contributors, is
skilfully welded together, and is guided
along five ways:
The first is the way of consciousness,
which emphasises the need for new
understanding and a change in human
thinking. It involves a reorientation
within Nature and the cosmos as a whole,
a shift away from an individualistic
approach, and the cultivation of a new
sense of the sacred.

58

The second is the way of selfunderstanding, of knowing who we
are, and what is involved in the spiritual
path. This means reaching deep down
into our weaknesses and addictions, but
at the same time reclaiming our animal
and bodily natures so that we can “reembrace that aspect of ourselves which
has grown out of the Earth”.
The third section opens up afresh
the spiritual pathway itself. It draws
on the world’s great religious and
wisdom traditions. It is plain from the
contributions in this section that it is
not enough to rely on the riches of the
past, but in our present condition we
must learn to rethink these traditions.
To quote Matthew Fox, “the religious
consciousness of humanity has to wake
up, to be reinvented, to be reborn”.
The fourth way turns towards the
greening of our culture at large, and the
way we express our beliefs in our social
life and in health, education, politics and
economics. The importance of balance
is emphasised in the idea of wellness
that brings together body, emotions,
mind and spirit, and links us with the
wellbeing of the planet. In education new
forms of schooling are needed, involving
the cultivation of a sense of wonder and
a recovery of feelings of kinship with the
Earth. And perhaps the most compelling
task at the present time is the rethinking
of economics in ways that go beyond
making money.
The final section takes us beyond theory

and invites us to ‘walk the talk’, to examine
every aspect of our lives so that we live
up to our green ideals. We are enjoined
to work with those ‘cultural creatives’
who actively pursue social justice and
sustainability in their daily lives, and we
are introduced to the history and practice
of the GreenSpirit movement itself.
Marian Van Eyk McCain has done an
excellent job in assembling and editing
such a distinguished collection of
writings, and the book serves to remind
us of the rich resources available from
the various fields of cosmology, creation
spirituality, Gaia theory, eco-philosophy,
and eco-feminism – far more than in
Charles Reich’s day. The volume is, to
quote Brian Swimme, “chock full of
creative potentiality”.
On finishing it, the big questions that
echo in my head are these: What is the
world doing with all this richness, all this
creative potentiality? When can we expect
The Greening of the World? Because for
all our advances in green wisdom over the
past 40 years, the green revolution Reich
predicted did not happen.
Forty years from now, will we still be
looking forward to rather than enjoying
it? It is up to us. As the editor points out
at the end of the book, we are jewels
in Indra’s net; hence our actions are
reflected ad infinitum.
John Clarke is professor emeritus in the history
of ideas at Kingston University, and is a former
chair of the Scientific and Medical Network.

n January 2009 I attended the opening of the Centre for
Climate Change Economics and Policy at the University
of Leeds, at which Nicholas Stern was a keynote speaker.
Three months earlier The Daily Telegraph had announced the end
of capitalism, yet the conference might as well have been held
in the boom times. It was a thoroughly dispiriting taste of
business as usual the ‘environmental’ way.
Former Harvard economist Juliet Schor’s first sentence in
her book Plenitude is “Global capitalism shattered in 2008.” She
goes on to describe the shocking scale of the problems we face.
She calculates that the weight of material extracted to provide
the average American with their daily shopping is 362lb
(164kg) – that’s the equivalent of the weight of a racehorse
every three days. She lists the false assumptions made by the
standard economic model, squares up to global warming and
pulls the rug from under the ‘ecological’ economic models that
encourage further growth before we act to cut emissions.
You’d think this would be a depressing read, but its power lies
precisely in its ability to be frank without getting you down.
Schor’s agenda here is to get away from what she calls “tradeoff thinking”, in which we weigh the pros of growth against
the cons of environmental and social responsibility. Plenitude is a
blueprint for a new economics of true wealth on a finite planet,
a positive vision of a desirable future.
Schor offers four principles for plenitude, which she
summarises as “work and spend less, create and connect more”.
In turn they yield the ecological benefits of ‘emit and degrade
less’ and the human ones of ‘enjoy and thrive more’.
It’s her third principle that is most provocative. She claims that

Issue 265

the economic alternative to the false materialism of symbolic
purchases and sickening waste is “true materialism”. The
alternative to ‘we want more’ isn’t ‘we want less’ (because hardly
anyone does) but ‘we want better’ – the consequence of which
is requiring less. “True materialism” is a passion for quality over
quantity, valuing skills, and demanding to know where things
come from, where they go and who is affected along the way.
It encourages long-lasting goods, repairing, sharing, reusing and
recycling. This is the deliberate “creation of a rich, materially
bountiful life”. That’s a message you can sell.
If there is a weakness, it is in Plenitude’s avoidance of any discussion
of the vested power interests that entrench false materialism and
resist change. Schor dodges this one by saying that plenitude
is a strategy that we can start now. We don’t have to wait for
government or Wall Street to get on board. We can be “pioneers of
the micro activity that is necessary to create the macro equilibrium
to correct an economy that is badly out of balance”.
Throughout the book, the author gives countless examples
of ordinary everyday pioneers. Yet my feeling is that the powers
behind ‘business as usual’ are loath to cooperate. She says, for
example, that raising the price of oil to reflect its real costs is
necessary, without actually tackling the political realities that
make it so unlikely.
Plenitude will, I believe, be a vital part of a change that isn’t
quite as easy as Schor implies.
Matt Carmichael is Secretary of Schumacher North. He is currently
writing Echoes of the Sun, a book about rest and replenishment for tired
people on a tired planet.

ntil about a quarter of a century
ago, with few exceptions, most
Christian Churches were absent
from any mainstream ecological debate.
Many ecologists, on the other hand,
professed to belief in a God, a Universal
Spirit, or a Grand Designer behind
Creation, but did not subscribe to any
formal religious faith. They either saw
this as an irrelevance, or they held the
Judaic-Christian tradition, in its various
forms, as being responsible for many of
today’s interrelated planetary crises.
It is only comparatively recently that
some Christian leaders have joined
forces with environmentalists to speak
out with increasing urgency in defence
of the Earth’s ecosystems and of future
generations. An indisputable trigger has
been the recognition that the Earth’s
climate is changing rapidly, leading to
unpredictable climatic disasters.
One early proponent of Christian
ecological lifestyles is Edward Echlin, a
Jesuit-trained theologian who, with his wife
Barbara, was an early member of Christian
Ecology Link (CEL). In Climate and Christ he
links Jesus Christ’s teaching and itinerant
ecological lifestyle with a blueprint for
Christian action on climate change.
Jesus and his disciples inherited the Jewish
agrarian tradition, leading a prophetic
‘alternative lifestyle’, treading lightly on
the Earth and living mainly off the land,
supplemented by fishing. The Gospels point
to a fellowship of sharing and sufficiency,
never taking more than was required.
Echlin admits that this particular

60

itinerant life is impracticable in today’s
society. However, if the principles of
frugality, partial self-sufficiency and
local sustainability could be adopted, not
just by Christians but by individuals and
communities from all faiths and walks of
life, it would significantly contribute to
mitigating the effects of climate change.
Writing in the aftermath of the UN
Summit in Copenhagen in December
2009, where 102 leaders of participating
countries failed to reach a binding
agreement on the reduction of carbon
emissions for fear of curtailing their
competitive economic advantage, Echlin
urges Christians now to take the lead.
The first part of the book describes what
climate change is, the process of positive
and negative feedback, and the imbalance
of radiative forcing set in motion by our
anthropogenic activities. Echlin challenges
each of us not only to drastically reduce
our own CO2 emissions to counter positive
feedback, but to facilitate and even to be
forces for negative feedback before a global
tipping point is reached.
The second chapter points to the
evolving contextual changes in our
understanding of science as it develops
and, in parallel, to the contextual
evolution of theology. Humans are no
longer considered as being the centre of
God’s creation but as being a responsible
part of it, and Christian theology must
now integrate evolution. We are reminded
that the words humus, humble and human are
all derived from the same root.
Directly linking Jesus’ example and

teaching with today’s messages and warnings
about climate change may not always be
easy when relying solely on the Gospel texts
and contemporary commentaries. However,
this is the underlying theme of the third part
of the book.
The final chapter is an inclusive call to
action by everyone. Cooperation needs
to be global, led by faith and political
leaders, and also local. No one should
underestimate what can be achieved
by individuals or by communities
producing at least some of their own
food, harvesting and conserving water
and recycling raw materials.
Echlin’s own motivating gurus happen
to be the recently beatified Cardinal
John Henry Newman, the eminent
French palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin, and John Seymour, an erstwhile
contributor to Resurgence.
The text is thoroughly researched, with
a plethora of references to contemporary
scientific and technical papers and
report, but what I enjoyed most was
the author’s own enthusiasm for the
soil and its myriad fellow inhabitants,
his delight in his own garden and its
seasonal produce, and his many personal
anecdotes. This book should send even
urban able-bodied readers reaching for
a communal spade and seeking out the
nearest plot of uncultivated land.
Diana Schumacher is co-founder of The
Schumacher Society, the New Economics
Foundation (nef), the Gandhi Foundation and
the Environmental Law Foundation (ELF).

Diana Schumacher is inspired by a
timely reminder that ecology and faith
share common principles that, if adopted,
will help mitigate climate change

REVIEWS

SATURATED
WITH SOUL
Stephan Harding revels in a book
with such transformative potential
that you will need to read it twice
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
David Abram
Pantheon Books, 2010
ISBN: 9780375421716

D

avid Abram is a true magician,
superbly skilled in both sleightof-hand magic and the literary
art of awakening us to the superabundant
wonders of the natural world. He is one
of America’s greatest Nature writers, and
this book is the long-awaited sequel to his
earlier masterpiece The Spell of the Sensuous,
which restores to modern consciousness
the ancient animistic sensibility that
everything is saturated with soul.
The essential achievement of Spell was
the revelation of how all beings, living
and non-living, palpably bring us home
to the pulsing heart of the world when
we listen to their long-stifled voices, and
in Becoming Animal Abram carries us off
on new and enlivening journeys into
the radically exciting possibilities of this
animistic style of perception.
This is a book of such transformative
potential that it needs to be read twice in
quick succession to get the full benefit. I
did just this, starting again as soon as I had
finished my first reading so that I could
savour much that I had missed in that first
immersion. The language is luminous, the
style hypnotic. Abram weaves a spell that
brings the world alive before your very eyes,
as everyday things that seemed dead take on
new life, new meaning and a new purpose.
Take shadows. For Abram, they are
the remains of the night’s sentience that
survive the day by glueing themselves to
objects exposed to the glaring light of
the sun. As the sun disappears behind the

Issue 265

Adivasi Tribe paintings, Jharkhand, India

Photo: Robert Wallis/Panos Pictures

horizon, shadows slowly seep back into
the world. And when night finally arrives,
we are carried into the “mammoth
shadow of the Earth” and hence into the
particular style of awareness adopted by
the very Earth itself as it contemplates
the vast spaces of its intergalactic habitat,
speckled with stars and planets.
Abram also enlivens our takenfor-granted sense of depth with the
transformative power of his perceptual
magic. When deep in the mountains, he
enters into that “elixir state of mind called
‘wilderness’”, in which the landscape
reveals its psyche by metamorphosing
around him as he explores its rugged
contours. He experiences the landscape
walking past him rather than the other
way around.
Thus does the world reveal itself in its
ambiguous depths as Abram discovers
himself deeply inside the physical world.
Even clouds, he says, are part of our
turning world, pulled as they are by the
thickness of the atmosphere itself. So he
gives us a new word, Eairth, to remind
us that the air is as much a part of the
Earth as the biosphere, the waters and
the rocks, and that our ‘i’, or self is totally
immersed in the swirling air. Eairth
implies that we live in the Earth and not
merely on it as disconnected observers.
I hope that by now you are beginning
to sense the measure of this marvellous
book. But perhaps you also feel a certain
scepticism creeping into your bones.

For how can it be that inert objects
and even mere shadows are alive? Isn’t
Abram indulging in an anthropomorphic
projection, valuable as poetry, perhaps, but
certainly not a genuine way of knowing?
Abram counters this by pondering the
possibility that it was this very animistic
sensibility that helped our ancestors to
survive, for they could not have flourished
without being able to discern the shifting
mood of a winter sky, or without a felt
rapport with all the complex entities in
their immediate surroundings.
I find these arguments compelling,
suggesting as they do that that our senses
are finely tuned to the rhythms and patterns
of the animate Earth because the biosphere
is, after all, the primordial creative matrix
from which we emerged as a species.
I have given you only the slightest
hint of the many and varied treasures
that lie waiting for you in this hugely
important book. Now you must read it
for yourself as a matter of urgency. For
there is little chance that we will discover
the restraint that we so urgently need to
survive the massive global crisis that we
have unleashed upon the world unless
we learn to sense the world around us as
a mysterious animate being that merits
our deepest care and respect.
Stephan Harding is Resident Ecologist and
Head of Holistic Science at Schumacher
College, and the author of Animate Earth: Science,
Intuition and Gaia.

61

a MORE
human
world
African-born Barbara Nussbaum
explains how better leadership
will emerge from communally
expressed humanity
Illustration: credit

O

ne of the premises of Personal
Growth African Style is that the
world urgently requires leaders
who carry a greater consciousness of our
shared humanity. In this context, Africa
has a vital role to play. In order for our
world to be whole, we need to reclaim
the humanity that Africa’s heritage can
give us. This is as important for emerging
leaders in South Africa as it is for our
continent and indeed the world.
We all lose out from the limited,
outdated view that still perceives the
world from a disconnected, individualistic
and fragmentary perspective. And so it is
critical that we make the shift to a new
kind of global leadership. Such a leadership
would be born and nourished through a
deep sense of interconnectedness and the
experience of the communal responsibility
that flows from a heartfelt feeling of
belonging to a global community.
Africa’s dominant worldview has
for centuries taken the human being
as the starting point, emphasising the
dignity and worth of all, and relying on
the philosophical constructs of ubuntu.
Central to ubuntu is the idea that self
evolves through identification with
the larger community: umuntu ngumuntu
ngabantu – ‘a person is a person through
other people’. At their heart, such values
call on each of us to be the kind of
leader who knows that we are who we
are because of other people and that as

62

people, living together in the community
of nation-state or world, we care about
everyone in that community.
The book builds on the best of what
African humanity offers and aims to
prepare younger leaders to live cocreatively in community; to paint a
picture of what it would mean to reclaim
communally expressed humanity; and to
redistil and refashion the many important
values that are the hallmark of Africa’s
heritage in the context of a post-colonial
world. It takes an optimistic view of all
Africa has to offer, and unashamedly
stands on the shoulders of Steve Biko,
who, with others, said that Africa’s
contribution to the world will be about
giving the world a more human face.
With all our knowledge, history and
technology, we desperately need this. And
although too few African political leaders
embody the promise of their own heritage,
Africa’s gift to global leadership lies deep
in its roots – in a communally expressed
humanity inspired by the collective
wisdom and actions of all human beings.
While studying 40 African dances to
complete a graduate degree in dance
therapy, I was moved by something I
now name ‘African group emotional
intelligence’, and the book seeks to
enliven such communally felt emotional
intelligence on an individual and a
collective scale.
This book was inspired by and written

for the younger generation who are
seeking to make sense of who they are
to become in a rapidly changing country.
In inviting our students at CIDA City
Campus in Johannesburg to reclaim
the value of their past, we developed a
reflective space and methodology for
them to build a different future. Our
book is an invitation to living with
soul, claiming individual destiny, and
living and learning together with more
compassion and mutual accountability.
Born in Zimbabwe to a Jewish family
who fled the Germany of the early
1930s, I celebrate the great privilege of
being born in Africa and being close to
the cradle of humankind. At 16 I felt a
youthful idealism to change the world, to
heal what did not make sense, and I chose
to blend the passion of a ballet dancer
with the high ideals of a young person
fascinated by the need for authenticity,
compassion and connectedness.
In a world that continues to choose
to see Africa’s shadow rather than its
light, this book takes a stand for the
promise of a different kind of world, by
reclaiming group emotional intelligence
and confidence in emerging leaders, and
restoring the values of ubuntu.
Personal Growth African Style by Barbara
Nussbaum, Sudhanshu Palsule and Velaphi
Mkhize is published by Penguin Books South
Africa. EAN: 9780143026389

A NEW LOGIC
Sara Parkin explains why ‘positive deviance’
is the only strategy left to environmentalists

M

uch of the green movement is still gripped by postCopenhagen tristesse – sadness caused by the loss of so
much hope vested in an even half-decent agreement
on climate change in December 2009. Some are trying to make
the best of a bad outcome, but many remain paralysed by that
failure of international leadership.
Where to campaign now, and for what? The more recent
2010 meeting in Cancún marshalled the depressed and the
cynical, but not the world leaders.
But was it wise to invest so much hope in a meeting of heads
of state in the first place? Did we really think the process and
the stage management would enable 192 nations to agree what
was in effect a common energy policy?
In Copenhagen the national leaders were caught as much on
the hop as were the conference organisers and a huge number
of NGOs. No one behaved well. Lazily, the leaders imagined
their ‘sherpas’ would fix some common enough ground so they
could fly in and cross the odd image-boosting ‘T’. Foolishly, the
organisers failed to understand that this really was decision time.
Disgracefully, the campaigning NGOs were unable to construct
an intelligible model of what a sustainable future could look like.

Issue 265

I don’t want to underplay the difficulties of shifting anything
or anyone onto a more sustainable trajectory, but short of
some tremendous catastrophe, it won’t come out of huge
international set pieces. Moreover, even if all countries had
signed up to a far-reaching agreement to cut CO2, this would
still have to be turned into action on the ground. Kofi Annan
made this point forcefully at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development in 2002. The crisis, he said, is in implementation.
We know what to do, so why don’t we do it?
We’ve made a historical error in adopting a way of relating
to each other that is mediated by the career of cash, rather than
how successful we are in nurturing each other and the rest
of life on Earth. But it was in this perverse (obstinately in the
wrong; against the truth) world where financial power always
trumps human welfare that the Copenhagen conference was
conducted. And the NGOs proved that mass lobbying was not
enough to build comprehension of, never mind confidence in,
sustainability as a new logic within which to make sense of
what to do next.
So is the green movement at a turning point? Yes, I would say
it is. Strategies and tactics of the last few decades have done a lot
to raise awareness, though little to push implementation. We used
to say “Think of your grandchildren”, but decades of inaction
means that worrying about future generations has been overtaken
by worries about this one. For me, the only strategy left to us is
positive deviance. This simply means doing the right thing despite
being surrounded by the wrong institutional structures.
For 15 years now, Forum for the Future has run a Leadership
for Sustainable Development taught masters programme, each
year graduating students with the knowledge and skills to operate
as positive deviants wherever they are living and working. And
it is my own learning from setting up and teaching some of
this course that I’ve tried to distil in a book, The Positive Deviant:
Sustainability Leadership in a Perverse World.
There are so very few courses like ours that there is little hope
of flooding the job market with sustainability-literate people any
time soon. So thankfully this is something that can be learnt and
tried at home or at work because, counter to much theory about
leadership, there is no one model or framework to squeeze
yourself into. We each have a unique leadership persona, and
working out what it is and building our confidence in using
it for sustainability outcomes is what matters most. Helping as
many people as possible to do that – whether you are starting
out anew, or filling gaps – is why I wrote this book.
Forum’s students report from their placement organisations
a growing number of positive deviants. Everyone can become
one. If unsustainable development was caused by zillions of
unknowingly (I am being generous) wrong decisions and
actions, then sustainability can be achieved through zillions of
knowingly right decisions and actions.
All you need to get started is in the book: enough knowledge,
a range of skills to practise, plus lots of ideas, tools and devices
to make it more likely that your decisions and actions contribute
to sustainable development than not.
(PS David Cameron has a copy already!)
Sara Parkin is a founder director of Forum for the Future. The Positive Deviant
may be bought at a discount via www.forumforthefuture.org (Proceeds
to Forum for the Future). To watch a free webinar by Sara Parkin visit
www.earthscan.co.uk/earthcasts

63

MEM B E R S  C O M M U N I T Y PAGE

STOPping Ocean Plastics
STOP – Science and Technology against Ocean Plastics – is a UK-based non-profit
organisation working to reduce the amount of plastic in the marine environment.
Resurgence supports this work, and here we explain how you too can get involved

T

his year, an estimated 5.5
quadrillion (or 5,500 million
million) plastic nurdles (preproduction plastic pellets), weighing
around 250 billion pounds, will be made
and disposed of and in all likelihood will
end up polluting the planet’s oceans.
Vast swathes of our seas are already
full of plastic which, when acted on
by sunlight and wave action, releases
toxins that are then absorbed by fish
and plankton, ultimately ending up on
our plates.
STOP is working to change this. As
well as lobbying governments and
raising greater awareness of the issue,
it is encouraging industry to ‘close the

loop’ on product life cycles and develop
more sustainable materials. The charity
also identifies and invests in practical
solutions to clear plastic waste already
littering the planet’s oceans and beaches.
In June this year, STOP will host
its first conference bringing together
key stakeholders, including scientists,
government, industry, media and
consumers, to further identify practical
solutions. Crucially, plastic manufacturers
will be joining the debate. This coming
together of different perspectives and
ideas represents a positive step forward
on this urgent issue, and Resurgence will be
supporting the initiative and following
the work closely.

Back to Front
Resurgence supporter Roxana Summers is the founder of
this inspirational project, which encourages the use of the
nation’s front gardens for food production

P

eople seem instinctively aware that the ability to grow food in our cities will be
a critical factor in developing essential resilience in the coming decade, and we
believe this is a trend that truly reflects a collective and progressive turning away
from consumer culture towards a healthier, saner and more natural lifestyle.
The Back to Front (BtoF) project was set up to promote growing food crops in
front gardens as a once-more socially acceptable ‘norm’.
Roxana, who is a member of Schumacher North (SN), explains the vision behind
the BtoF idea: “I long to eradicate derelict front gardens and the notion that you
can’t grow vegetables in the front garden…I long to see a city where neighbours get
together to grow food and exchange produce. I think it will bring people together
and make them more self-reliant.”
www.backtofront.org.uk

The first STOP Live conference runs
from 1st to 2nd June in Los Angeles, USA,
and Resurgence readers who attend will
receive a 10% discount on admission.
Visit live.stopoceanplastics.org for more
information on the conference and
www.stopoceanplastics.org for more about
the campaign.

supports...

Be the Change

L

ast year, Resurgence reader Gill
Coombs ran a series of ‘Living
in
Harmony’
workshops
around the country, exploring how
we live in relation to the people
and planet around us. She’s currently
planning a new series of workshops
on the same theme for June 2011,
called ‘Be the Change’.
For more details and an outline of the
day, contact Gill on 01249 730472 or
info@gillcoombs.co.uk
Read about last year’s workshops:
www.gillcoombs.co.uk/natural-life.php

What do you think of this idea? Feedback from Resurgence readers is welcomed.
The full version of this article can be found at www.resurgence.org
The Community Page is compiled by Resurgence Deputy Editor Elizabeth Wainwright. editorial@resurgence.org

64

March/April 2011

RESURGENCE GROUPS  MEMBERS

Photo: Richard Speirs

How to
Start a
Readers’
Group
R

esurgence groups provide an
opportunity for people to meet
together in local groups, sharing
ideas, an eco-friendly way of life,
meditation and seasonal food. If there
isn’t a local group near you – why not
start one? Each group has the flexibility
to arrange their own sessions and decide
on the frequency of their meetings. There
are no fixed rules! What is important
is that everyone comes along feeling

optimistic and enthusiastic and leaves
feeling nourished in body and mind.
If you are interested, we can send you
a starter pack which gives advice and
information on how to set up your own
group. We can also help by providing
back issues, CD’s and other resources for
your use and we can get in touch with
Resurgence readers in your area to let
them know you are starting a group. We
can give them your contact details and

information on your group, and we can
also list your details on our website and
in the magazine.
We intend to feature existing
Resurgence groups in future editions of
Resurgence and our current groups are
listed below.
To find out more or for a readers’ pack call
Jeanette Gill on +44 (0) 1208 841824 or
email members@resurgence.org

RESURGENCE READERS’ GROUPS
Resurgence readers’ opportunity to meet together in local groups, sharing meditation, ideas, an eco-friendly way of life, and seasonal food. For more
information on local groups across the UK, or to start your own group, contact Jeanette Gill: members@resurgence.org 01208 841824

Gifts to Treasure from The Resurgence Trust Shop
Find inspiration within the pages of these beautifully illustrated books.
Treat yourself or give a gift that will bring joy, delight and inspiration.

LIFELINES

SELECTED DRAWINGS OF TRUDA LANE

Plus free, reusable eco-friendly bag (rrp £2.50)
This series of drawings by Truda Lane evokes the
magic of natural landscapes and of our inner worlds.
Truda Lane has been a regular illustrator for
Resurgence magazine for many years, and we are
delighted to publish her first book.

£10.00 plus p&p 72pp, pb

(UK £2.20/EU £4.31/Rest of world £7.80)

IMAGES OF EARTH & SPIRIT
Featuring the work of over 50 artists whose work has an enduring spiritual resonance, this
exquisite book celebrates the Earth and the renewal of life. With over 140 illustrations.

COURSES
DISCOVER YOUR OWN MUSIC
with The School of Creative Music Making. Our
2011 programme comprises four residential
weekends for beginners and experienced
players. www.creativemusicmaking.com or
01453 767061
SOAP-MAKING WORKSHOPS
in South London. Telephone 0783 732 4985 for
further details. Visit www.genesissoap.co.uk

68

EMPOWERING POSITIVE CHANGE
Weekend workshops based on Joanna
Macy’s empowerment approach The Work
That Reconnects. 8th-10th April with Chris
Johnstone and Jenny Mackewn near Bath;
10th-12th June with Chris Johnstone and
Jewels Wingfield at Monkton Wyld, Dorset;
18th-20th Nov with Chris Johnstone and
Jewels Wingfield at Monkton Wyld, Dorset.
One-year facilitator training/development
group near Bath with Chris Johnstone and
Jenny Mackewn starts weekend of 20th-22nd
May 2011. For details, contact Chris
(e) findyourpower@mac.com or see
www.chrisjohnstone.info
WELCOME TO THE GARDEN STATION
Courses for you, art, planet and harmony. The
Garden Station is a restored Victorian railway
station in beautiful Northumberland, with a
fabulous environmentally responsible cafe, a
lovely woodland garden and art exhibitions. Tel.
01434 684391 www.thegardenstation.co.uk

SOUL TALK
Pearls of Wisdom to Share and Explore.
Monthly group meetings in Brighton. Tel John
Dunn 01273 602299 and 07990 968714.
Share the company of stimulating and likeminded people.
MALIDOMA SOME
African spirituality & ritual. Residential
workshop ‘Healing with your ancestors’
at Hawkwood College Stroud 28-30 May.
Also private divinations in London & Oxford.
For more details
email: richardpantlin@yahoo.co.uk

SATISH KUMAR TALKS ON CD
A selection of talks by Satish Kumar is now
available on CD and DVD via the Resurgence
website. Talks include Satish’s Schumacher
lecture ‘Slow Down, Go Further’ (Dublin
2004), ‘Cultural Nonviolence’ and ‘Reverential
Ecology’. To find out more or buy a CD/DVD
online
visit
www.resurgence.org/satishkumar/video-audio.html

MISCELLANEOUS
FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT
Proofreading and copy-editing by a member
of the Resurgence team. Reliable, friendly
service. Helen Banks 01726 823998
helenbanks@phonecoop.coop
STRESSFUL LIFE?
Articles,
blog,
professional
coaching.
Sustainable living, sustainable small business,
how to downshift. www.sallylever.co.uk
a legacy for the future
Your legacy, however modest, to the
Resurgence Trust could make the future a
better one. For more information, contact
Satish Kumar, The Resurgence Trust, Ford
House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon, EX39 6EE,
UK, or email info@resurgence.org
LIVING LOW-CARBON?
We want to hear from you! lowcarbonlifestyle.
org is featuring 100-word ‘Lifestyle Reports’
on low-carbon products and choices as part of
the new lifestyle resource. Examples are ‘My
wood-fuelled Aga’, ‘My skiing holiday by train’
or ‘How I gave up my car’. If you can contribute
a short report with photo we will be delighted.
Contact hannah@lowcarbonlifestyle.org

PROPERTY FOR SALE
IRELAND
Co. Clare and surrounding areas: farmhouses,
cottages, smallholdings, etc., in beautiful
unspoilt countryside. Some within reach of
Steiner school. Greenvalley Properties. Tel.
(+353) (0)6192 1498 www.gvp.ie
ALPUJARRAS, ANDALUCIA
15+ hectares stunning mountain land with
three ruins. 1hr coast/Granada. Amazing
views. Plentiful water from own spring.
Neighbouring O’Sel Ling Buddhist Centre.
Ideal retreat location, self-sufficiency/nature
holiday project. £225,000 ono.
Details/photos contact wilcojames@mac.com
LONGING FOR BLUE SKIES,
warm sunshine and golden beaches in
a green and creative area? Here’s an
amazing opportunity – a tropical tree house
for grown-ups. The ocean is aqua and a
wonderful temperature year round, the
surf is great and currently it’s mango and
lychee season. Where on earth are we? SE
Queensland Australia in the beautiful Noosa
Hinterland and offering the most stunning
panoramic coastal views, privacy, position
and potential. www.treetopsnoosa.com.au

WANTED
“YOU’D MOVE TO RURAL FRANCE
in a heartbeat, if you could only sell your
house here... Well, would you swap your UK
property for our old and lovely half-restored
gem with some land? We’re quite serious.
Call 01793 813766 or email talis@talis.net
for more information.”

TAGORE FESTIVAL: REQUEST
for offers of hospitality in the Totnes area.
Resurgence is organising a week-long Tagore
festival of the arts & crafts at Dartington Hall,
Totnes in May 2011. We are seeking offers of
hospitality for our speakers, performers &
volunteers. If any readers have spare rooms
and are kindly able to offer hospitality we will
be delighted and grateful. Please contact Satish
Kumar with your offers. Email: tagorefestival@
resurgence.org Tagore Festival, Schumacher
College, The Old Postern, Dartington, Totnes,
Devon TQ9 6EA

Investment opportunities
don’t get much bigger than this.
Find out what on earth you should be investing in.

This event will help raise money for The Resurgence Trust
(Charity No.1120414) registered in England and Wales.

Get Phone, Broadband or Mobile services
from The Phone Co-op and support The
Resurgence Trust
Call 0845 458 9040
to find out more.
Issue 265

www.thephone.coop/resurgence
71

HAWKWOOD

Resurgence
smallrockwood
box colour
£92 ark
per insertion
or £69 each (25
chool
of three.
We areNov/Dec
a co-educational
NYrRetreat; Co-Creatin
international boarding school
Then
in the Hampshire countryside,
Jan-Feb
offering
a diverse(pub
and 15 Dec) NYrRetreat; Co
personalised
programme
Mar/April
(openofday)
study including
pre-AS, ads
AS and
Review further
with Gwydion
A level subjects. Our aim is to
provideJune/July
an holistic(summer)
education for

B
P

Hawkwood College is a lovely,
welcoming holistic education centre
near STROUD in the Cotswolds.

CO- CREATING
in Momentous Times

A Wrekin Trust TRANSFORUM with

Jude Currivan ~ Gill Edwards & others

Fri 25– Sun 27 March 2011
*

OPEN DAY

S

around 65 students aged between
14-19 years
that
Tall old
box:
60encourages
wide x 136 high
academic
excellence,
self£138 each (25%off)
for series
understanding, creativity
and integrity in a safe, noncompetitive environment.

The Resurgence website gets an average of 50,000 visits per month
Resurgence now offers online advertising for everyone who advertises in the
magazine – just place your classified advert online for an extra £10
Display advertisers can place a banner linked to a website for an extra £20
For more information call 01237 441293
email advert@resurgence.org or visit www.resurgence.org
and click on Resurgence Advertising
Spiritual Teaching and Healing Centre
In search of Peace, Truth & Wisdom

01986 798682

72

All adverts are subject to our terms and conditions, available at
www.resurgence.org/advertise or on request

www.erasmus-foundation.org

March/April 2011

BI JA

An International School
for Sustainable Living
Dehra Dun, North India

Bhoomi – Building Earth Democracy and

However, today this lifeline is under serious threat. Dam building,
hydro electric projects and increasing pollution is destroying
the Ganga. Save the Ganga Movements are emerging to create
awareness on the threats to the Ganga and to find ways to
protect the Ganga – our living heritage and life support.
The Ganga Yatra will begin from Dehradun, travel through Tehri
and Uttarkashi and end at Rishikesh with the Ganga Aarti.

Protecting the Rights of Mother Earth
3-5 October 2011

With Vandana Shiva, Cormac Cullinan
As the assault on the Earth increases and the threat to human
survival intensifies, new movements for Earth Democracy are
emerging.Women of Plachimada shut down Coca Cola plants,
tribal people of Niyamgiri shut down Vedanta’s bauxite mine,
people everywhere are rising against landgrab. The course covers
movement building for the defense of the earth and peoples’ rights.
Participants have the option of attending the Bhoomi – The
Earth Festival on 2nd October, 2011 in New Delhi.

Gandhi and Globalisation
November 24 – December 4

The Ganga Yatra – A journey to witness India’s
Lifeline under Threat
7-12 November 2011

With Sunderlal Bahuguna, other members of Save the Ganga
Movement, the Navdanya team and local communities
Ganga is India’s lifeline – spiritually, culturally and materially.

With Satish Kumar,Vandana Shiva,Venerable Samdhong
Rinpoche
The course on Gandhi and Globalisation will address the multiple
crisis that globalization has unleashed – economic, ecological
and political. Gandhi’s philosophy and politics are more relevant
than ever before in finding ways to live peacefully, equitably and
sustainably on this fragile planet. The course shows how Gandhi’s
observation that the earth has enough for everyone’s needs and
not for some peoples greed can be translated into emerging
movements for the defense of the earth and people’s rights.

WHY WE LIVE AFTER DEATH
By Dr Richard Steinpach
Why are we here on Earth today?
How does the soul outlive the body?
Where does it go in the Beyond?
What happens to us over there?
What is the real meaning of life?
Irrefutable evidence coupled
with new knowledge that clearly
demonstrates how our Earth-life is
but a short yet decisive episode in
our entire existence.

Postgraduate Diploma in
Applied Psychosynthesis
Validated by the
University of East London

Open to anyone with appropriate life
experience and understanding.

Central to psychosynthesis is a celebration of
the vast potential of the human spirit. This
programme offers an in-depth study of the
psychosynthesis model of the human being
within individual, interpersonal, social and
global contexts.

Learn powerful tools, techniques and
approaches for use by change agents and
practitioners from a variety of fields, such as
management, organisational and community
development, education and the arts.
The course blends emotional and cognitive
learning, integrating personal experience with
a theoretical understanding of key models and
principles.
The aims of the two-year programme:

Please debit my card no.
Expiry date

Card type

Security code
I enclose a cheque q (made payable to:

The Resurgence Trust)

Develop students understanding of
psychosynthesis as a core model of theory
and practice.



Bring a psychosynthesis perspective to
people seeking to develop themselves as
reflective practitioners who wish to
contribute to building a flourishing, just,
resilient world.



Starts September 2011

Name
Address
Postcode
Tel no.
Email
Please remind me when my advert expires:
Yes q No q
Adverts cost £1.00 per word (incl.VAT).
There is a 25% discount for advertising in three
or more issues. Payment must be received
before placement of first advert.
By submitting any advert for publication you are
agreeing to our terms and conditions available at
www.resurgence.org/advertise or on request.

Friendship & dating
service for single
country-lovers
& walkers
nationwide

Rathbone
Greenbank
Investments

NaturalFriends-Ad-60x66-aw.indd 1

01/11/2010 12:40

You have values do your investments?
We recognise you want investments that
are right for you financially. But we also
know you want us to seek investments
that are responsible and respect your
values.
Ethical investment for private
clients, trusts and charities
Tel: 0117 930 3000
www.rathbonegreenbank.com
greenbank@rathbones.com
Rathbone Greenbank Investments is a trading name of Rathbone Investment Management Limited,
which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Reg. office: Port of Liverpool
Building, Pier Head, Liverpool L3 1NW. Registered in England No. 1448919

Issue 265

University of Winchester
Although we are familiar with
the dream state, there is a
great deal to understand
about the physiology,
psychology and meaning of
dreaming. For this
conference we have brought
together a team of experts
who will consider various
aspects of the topic.
Chairs:
Dr. Peter Fenwick,
David Lorimer
Speakers:
Dr. Larry Dossey,
Prof. Mark Blagrove,
Prof. Charles Laughlin,
Paul Devereux,
Dr. Cedrus Monte,
Dr. Morton
Schatzman

For further
information
please contact the
office on 01608 652 000
or email
info@scimednet.org

www.scimednet.org
Scientific and Medical Network

75

P

Natural Life Coaching with Gill Coombs
❀ Gain a deeper understanding of your ‘natural self’
❀ Develop a vision of a more natural life
❀ Work creatively towards your chosen future
❀ Live a life more congruent with your values
Diploma in Professional Coach-Mentoring (Distinction)
01249 730472 • www.gillcoombs.co.uk/natural-life.php

‘Through becoming more fully our natural selves there is abundant
potential for joy, creativity and wellbeing’
“It amazes me that every
issue has something that I've
been thinking about.”

“Reading Juno feels like
having a conversation with
a good friend.”

“This magazine is such a
breath of fresh air and full of
genuinely thought provoking
articles.”

Juno is a parenting magazine
with an ethos based on conscious parenting, sustainability,
social justice, non-violence and
a commitment to personal
growth and spiritual awareness.

www.permaculture.co.uk
Permaculture features stories from people who are creating a
more sustainable, life-enhancing human society. Their inspiring
solutions show you how to grow organic food, eco-build & renovate
and how to live an environmentally friendly life. It is full of news,
reviews, courses, contacts & clever ideas for you and your family.
Permaculture is published quarterly in full colour, 80 pages.
Subscribe for just: ÂŁ12.95 (UK 1 year)
Write to: Permaculture Magazine Res, The Sustainability
Centre, East Meon, Hampshire GU32 1HR
Telephone: 01730 823 311
Email: info@permaculture.co.uk

Celebrating 20 years at
Schumacher College
Resurgence readers may be aware that 2011 marks
the 20th anniversary of Schumacher College. It is
also the centenary of the birth of E.F. Schumacher
whose work was inspirational in the founding of the
College.
Thank you for being part of creating these first
amazing 20 years.
During this special year we will be running courses
with many names familiar to you including David
Orr, Vandana Shiva, Iain McGilchrist and Satish
Kumar. We will be launching a Masters degree in
Economics for Transition, another first of its kind
alongside our Masters in Holistic Science.
We are expanding our programmes in sustainable
horticulture, land use and ecological design and
build. Alongside these plans is the development of
an Open Learning platform. We want to reach as
many people as possible with thoughtful practice
that will truly help with the global transformation
needed at this critical time.

Gustavo Esteva teaching course participants at Schumacher College

Transformative Learning for Sustainable Living

If you are excited by the work of Schumacher
College and feel able to make a donation at this
time, you can read more about this campaign
and all our activities at
www.schumachercollege.org.uk

For twenty years Schumacher College has
supported transformative learning for sustainable
living. But now we need your support.
The College urgently needs to raise around ÂŁ250,000
in 2011, in addition to the generous support of The
Dartington Hall Trust. These funds are vital to the
future of our programmes and to help us reach those
who can make a difference around the world.

How can we justify producing so much
material that takes seconds to make, is used
only once, and yet will most likely remain in
the environment for thousands of years?
Plastic pollution in the
marine environment is now
recognised as one of the
most serious environmental
and human health issues
facing us today. We use and
discard such huge quantities
of these synthetic materials
that vast areas of our
oceans now contain more
plastic than plankton.

Our Research
Partners:

Calling all leaders
from science, industry,
government, NGOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and
media to come together
to share knowledge,
collaborate, and help
identify practical and
immediate solutions
to reduce the amount
of plastic in the marine
environment.

March/April 2011

To celebrate our 45th year, this issue celebrates the champions of intrinsic values who have contributed to the success of Resurgence, including Caroline Lucas, Vandana Shiva, Annie Lennox and Václav Havel. Feature articles include HRH The Prince of Wales on Islam and the Environment, and Rowan Williams on Moral Housekeeping.